[Simh] BLISS ( was Re: 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access))

[Paul Koning]

> On Jan 26, 2018, at 2:38 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> ...
> ​VMSinc had the Gem compiler as part of their license.   As I say, they have Neil hacking on it again.   But I believe that he is only worried about Itanium and INTEL*64 at the moment.​  I also do not know what they are doing with the front-ends.  

One of the more curious front ends of GEM is the Alpha assembler.  I found out about that when doing some Alpha hand-optimizing early on (a handcoded "memcpy with TCP checksum calculation while doing it" if I remember right).  It turned out I could write drafts of that code and give it to the assembler with a /OPTIMIZE switch to let the back end take what I wrote and do stuff to it.  It wasn't always right, but it was a neat source of ideas.

The only other optimizing assembler I can think of is SOAP, way back in the 1950s.

	paul