getting a Binary module into the standard libs

[Eray Ozkural]

On Monday 11 November 2002 11:54, Simon Marlow wrote:
>
> I should add that I never actually benchmarked the speed difference
> between using bits and bytes, and I don't believe it's clearly a win to
> use bytes.  There's the time to get the data off the disk, caching
> effects, etc. to take into account, all of which tend to be more
> important the more recent your machine is.
>

Nowadays, the bandwidth inside the ALUs (most chips are superscalar) beat the 
memory bandwidth by far so you have time to interleave any memory transfer 
code with a good number of ops.

I remember that we could do that on the MC68000 8 years ago and a good FORTRAN 
compiler should be knowing about this fact of modern architectures for more 
than a decade.

Actually if you can achieve a significant saving in space, the bitstream 
approach would be faster!

Regards,

-- 
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo  Malfunction: http://mp3.com/ariza
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