Why are compilers so stupid?
- by martinus
I always wonder why compilers can't figure out simple things that are obvious to the human eye. They do lots of simple optimizations, but never something even a little bit complex. For example, this code takes about 6 seconds on my computer to print the value zero (using java 1.6):
int x = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < 100 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000; ++i) {
x += x + x + x + x + x;
}
System.out.println(x);
It is totally obvious that x is never changed so no matter how often you add 0 to itself it stays zero. So the compiler could in theory replace this with System.out.println(0).
Or even better, this takes 23 seconds:
public int slow() {
String s = "x";
for (int i = 0; i < 100000; ++i) {
s += "x";
}
return 10;
}
First the compiler could notice that I am actually creating a string s of 100000 "x" so it could automatically use s StringBuilder instead, or even better directly replace it with the resulting string as it is always the same. Second, It does not recognize that I do not actually use the string at all, so the whole loop could be discarded!
Why, after so much manpower is going into fast compilers, are they still so relatively dumb?
EDIT: Of course these are stupid examples that should never be used anywhere. But whenever I have to rewrite a beautiful and very readable code into something unreadable so that the compiler is happy and produces fast code, I wonder why compilers or some other automated tool can't do this work for me.
