Quote:if you could compile custom assembly code for them, you could multiply their efficiency by maybe 10xI seriously doubt it. I assume most of those chips can be targeted by the C compilers that are excellent at optimizing, such as GCC or CLANG, right? That is, those chips almost certainly can't run the newest versions of GCC or CLANG (even my 12-year-old laptop has trouble running them, the newest version of TDM-GCC runs out of the 512 MB RAM if you try to compile the Duktape framework with all optimizations turned on), but it's possible to cross-compile the C code to run on those chips using those compilers? Unless you are an extremely experienced assembly-language programmer with a lot of time, you can't write more efficient Assembly than the GCC's output or the CLANG's output when the optimization is turned on.
Programming in assembly can perhaps help if the only C compilers available for those chips are the likes of Tiny C Compiler, which is very fast itself, but that comes at the price of being unable to do optimizations (which is not important if the programs it produces will only run on computers or smartphones or even Raspberry Pi, but it's a huge drawback if you target low-powered embedded systems).
But, let's be honest, when you are forced to write some part of the code in Assembly (like when you are writing a compiler), do you really worry about how efficient the code you write is? Or do you just write whatever gets the things done in fewer lines of code, even if that involves allocating 4 MB of stack just to get the next permutation of a string? In JavaScript, an equivalent code would take quite some time to execute even on modern computers, but if, you write that in Assembly or C, that would execute in an imperceptible amount of time. At least on my 12-year-old laptop, but probably not on low-powered chips...
