[fpc-devel]Assembly routines problem

[andrew johnson]

On Wed, 2002-11-13 at 14:36, Anton Tichawa wrote:
> hi, andrew!
> 
> > I know little assembly and DO NOT want to waste my time learning more,
> 
> well, I LIKE ASSEMBLER, and i don't consider the time i spent with assembler 
> being wasted ;)
> 

thanks.. and more power to you but... I have had a need to use a
Assembly for speed only a hand full of times in the past.. so it is a
waste given that I am likely to never again use what knowledge I might
learn in the process..besides why use assembly when a.) I want cross CPU
capabilities, b.) when there is no worthwhile difference in speed(for
the stuff I do)? I don't do MMX, or the like, and don't write drivers or
the like.. and I am not involved in anything like the RTL or FCL which
might need it to supply the Cross-Platform/CPU stuff. but anyway..

> two weeks ago i translated an fpc-procedure for simple graphic rendering to 
> assembly, and it worked great!
> 

I tried adding {$ASMMode Intel} and the stuff compiled. 

> it's hard to answer your questions without knowing the codes. i can take a 
> look at it if you want to.
> 

like I said proprietary.. don't know what all the license says about
that sort of thing, else I would have posted the actual code to one of
the smaller ones.

> maybe you can try, instead, to rewrite these 3 procedures in pascal and see 
> if and how fast it works?
> 

I would love to convert it to pascal or better yet throw it out the
window..but I don't know what it does.. and cannot understand the asm
behind it. oh well.. I will continue to work on the rest of the
components and get everything working then come back to this and see if
I can't rip the code out entirely.

> ciao,
> 
> anton
> 
> On Wednesday 13 November 2002 19:07, you wrote:
> 
> > I am porting some low-level(proprietary) components to FPC. They in turn
> > use a unit with some basic scaling routines, which are in assembly..
> >
> > but the routines in question will not compile.. so first.. for Delphi
> > assembly compatibility do I have to change assembler mode.. like to AT&T
> > Vs. Intel? 2nd do routines like these already exist in the FPC, so that
> > I can simply get rid of them? The headers declare them(the routines
> > which won't compile) as :
> >
> > { Scales up floating point Value into whole integer Value  }
> > function ScaleUp(Value: Extended; Places: integer): Integer;
> >
> > { Scales down whole integer Value into floating point Value }
> > function ScaleDown(Value: Integer; Places: integer): Extended;
> >
> > { Checks double for valid values for 52-bit integer }
> > function ValidInt52(Value: Double): Boolean;
> >
> >
> > For the first two I do not understand why floor/ceil aren't being used
> > anyway.. and for the 3rd I do not see what purpose it could possible
> > serve. But since I don't use it directly and I am not familiar enough
> > with the components internals, I cannot say for certain that it will
> > work fine without them.
> >
> > Anybody help is appreciated.
> >
> > Andrew
> >
> >

Well thanks anyway!

Andrew