Pete's Log: Log Entry 289
Entry #289, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 21 years old.)
well, i got two of the four things on my itinerary for today done. i put a lot more work into my compiler than i thought i would, and i went to don pablo's with arun, brian, and helped grad students who finished their quals celebrate. ate a lot, too, which was nice. i didn't get around to reading smashing the stack for fun and profit, and poker night got cancelled. did get to see voyager, tho.
made good progress on the optimizer. considering i started it at about 1 or 2 this afternoon, and took several large breaks, i'm pretty content with the progress i've made. i've implemented dead code elimination, jump chaining, dead register elimination, arithmetic optimization, elimination of redundant load/stores, replacement of push/pops with use of free registers, and inlining of single-block procedures. there may be more, but i forget. anyway, run on the phase4 vsuite, i get an average speedup of 34.1% (that is, programs execute, on average, only 65.9% of the instructions they used to). i can live with that, tho i wanna see if i can get it any better...
today is mom's birthday. happy birthday, mom! i need to remember to give her a call.
one thing i was thinking about on my way back to keenan is the fact that non-geeks really can't have a true appreciation for some of the stuff us geeks do... they can see that what we do isn't easy, and that it takes a lot of time, but they can't appreciate the elegance or cleverness of something. not like a non-artist can appreciate a piece of art, or a non-musician can appreciate music. oh well.