|
I spent a fair amount of time working on building my own from-scratch C compiler that I no longer work on anymore: https://recc.robertelder.org/ One of the reasons that I stopped working on it was because of how slow it became, so I might be able to contribute to answering your question. Initially, when the compiler was simpler, it was actually much faster. I was able to do some meaningful proof of concept demos with it like compiling a small microkernel, and compiling most of its own source code. Of course, the natural thing to do is to make it so that could cross-compile itself and run in the browser, and that's where it became terribly slow, which required more code to optimize, and the new code that was added to make it faster in the long term made it much slower in the short term. To start with, if you think of a simple piece of code like this: if ( 1 ) { putc('a'); }
This is only a 23 byte character program, so why should it be slow to compile? Well, the first stage of parsing this program involves tokenization. In this short program, I count 16 different 'tokens' (including the whitespace). If you want to have even the simplest data structure to describe one of your 'tokens', that only contains a single pointer to an offset in the program, then you will need to consume 16 pointers just for the tokens. On a 64 bit machine, you'll have 8 byte pointers, and 16 * 8 = 128 bytes, just for the pointers into the byte array of the program! And we haven't even started talking about the memory overhead of all the other things you'll need to describe about these tokens in your token object.So, now we already have a memory overhead that is more than 5 times as big as the program, but we also have to build the parse tree, control flow graphs, linker objects etc. and you also have to pull in a mess of header files, bloated libraries etc. If you're wasteful with memory in the compiler, you can easily run out of memory from compiling a few megabytes of source code. Being more intelligent with memory management requires copying memory around a lot, which also adds to the latency. So, now you need to think about optimizing your memory use, and do 'smarter' things that trade memory usage for CPU. Plus, you're likely to also start needing free/delete a lot from heap memory which is a system call and therefore slower than a call within your program. By the time you implement all this 'optimization', you compiler has become an incredibly complicated and bloated system that requires even more code to optimize all the opportunities for improvement. |