Re: question about gcc assembly

[Tim Prince <timothyprince at sbcglobal dot net>]

Coline Lelong-Pantel wrote:
> Hi
>
> I've compiled a short program with two different gcc versions
> (3.2.3 and 3.4.3) but it seems that the produced assembly code
> isn't the same.
>
> In fact 3.4.3 produce a more important code. For example when
> gcc 3.2.3 produces :
> movl	$0x405c28f6, -4(%ebp)
>
> gcc 3.4.3 may use:
> movl	$0x405c28f6, %eax
> movl	%eax, -4(%ebp)
>
> I wonder why it now uses %eax register ? And is there any way
> to prevent this, in order to have similar assembly code with
> both gcc versions ? Maybe some kind of option ?
>
> Thanks for your answers.

Both gcc versions you quote are fairly old; if efficiency interests you, 
you might try a current version.  Were you able to show a significant 
difference in performance on a CPU which is important to you?  I would 
guess the most important reason for avoiding use of eax here would be to 
keep that register available for other use.  The optimization could be 
affected by compiler switches (-Os, -O2) or by selection of -march 
option, and many other possibilities.
Newer CPUs have hardware merging of operations, as well as stalls on 
certain immediate data operations, so it is impossible to know the 
performance implications from what you have presented.