A support question brought up an interesting optimization topic: alternative opcodes.

We've all heard stories of using undocumented or unofficial opcodes to squeeze out a few cycles' extra performance. It's much easier, not to mention safer, to work within the published instruction set but to approach it in novel ways.

Here's an example:

There's an active discussion about optimization and debugging going on on comp.programming and comp.compilers.

There is no technical reason why compiled code on the eTPU cannot be as tight as hand-optimized code. The ISO C standard for embedded systems overcomes previous C language limitations related to embedded.

There are three things that the eTPU_C compiler can do very well that hand optimization finds difficult.

1. Computers are very good at accounting.