Richard E. Sweet
[Igor]<Sweet>Performance80a.bravo

My previous review date was December 16; not many things have happened since then. Attached is a copy of my previous appraisal. The activities below were performed after I submitted the last one on November 14.

1.Analysis of Instruction Set -- I have spent most of my time in this area together with Loretta Guarino Reed. With help from Leroy Nelson in El Segundo, we have obtained a reasonably large data base of Star File System and Star Workstation code. We have concentrated on instructions that deal with 32 bit data and long pointer dereferencing. We have also compared the code size of product software as a function of several compilation switches (including the large stack size). A few mild surprises have surfaced, but more analysis is needed before final conclusions can be drawn.

2.Compiler Development -- I obtained a complete copy of the current Mesa compiler from CSL, removed the Cedar language extensions, and changed the interface to be compatible with our Pilot based development environment.

3.Packager -- I converted the piece table portion of the packager to use the Pilot virtual memory routines instead of the custom virtual memory that it contained to run on a space-starved Alto.

4.General Support -- I began work on a memo on how to write programs so that the compiler can generate efficient code. I wrote a UserProc for listing code that can be quite useful for low-level debugging.

5.General Xerox Activities -- I participated in a meeting at Intel to discuss the applicability of their new microprocessor lines to SDD’s future needs.