Life is often about compromise, but embedded developers really are not good at that. Code generation is a context in which compromise is somewhat inevitable and we call it “optimization”. All modern compilers perform optimization, of course. Some do a better job than others. A lot of the time, the compiler simply guesses which optimization will produce the best result without knowing what the designer really wants. For desktop applications, this is OK. Speed is the only important criterion, as memory is effectively free. But embedded is different … (more…)