 Permalink for comment 207770 Member since:  That's the fun
thing about "theoretically better" solutions. In practice,
you're so often limited by developer resources, that a simple,
but well-implemented and highly tuned solution will end up being
better than a more sophisticated design that hasn't had the same
amount of tuning. Take, for example, GCC's register allocator.
It's a theoretically unsophisticated design with an enormously
complex (and convoluted) implementation. We're talking about
something that wouldn't have been state of the art even 20 years
ago. Yet, it creates surprisingly good allocations, because it's
had so much tuning. Or, take the x86 code generator in Ocaml. It
doesn't do any fancy SSA-based optimizations, but it generates
very good code.The generated code is very straightforward and
small, and it turns out that modern x86's care very much about
code size and very little about fancy scheduling.  Now, of
course, implementation tuning being equal, a fancy design is
almost always going to