Misc/abrash-black-book
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James Gregory 2013-12-30 13:57:02 +11:00
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<H3><A NAME="Heading4"></A><FONT COLOR="#000077">Table-Driven Magic</FONT></H3>
<H3><A NAME="Heading4"></A>Table-Driven Magic</H3>
<P>David Stafford won my first Optimization Challenge by means of a huge look-up table and an incredible state machine driven by that table. The table didn&rsquo;t cause David&rsquo;s entry to exceed the line limit because David&rsquo;s submission included code to generate the table on the fly as part of the build process. David has done himself one better this time with his QLIFE program; not only does his build process generate a 64K table, but it also generates virtually all his code, consisting of 17,000-plus lines of assembly language spanning another 64K. What David has done is write the equivalent of a bitblt compiler for the Game of Life; one might in fact call it a Life compiler. What David&rsquo;s code generates is still a general-purpose program; it takes arbitrary seed values, and can run for an arbitrary number of generations, so it&rsquo;s not as if David simply hardwired the instructions to draw each successive screen. However, it&rsquo;s a general-purpose program that is exquisitely tailored to the task it needs to perform.
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<P>All the pieces of QLIFE are shown in Listings 18.1 through 18.5, as follows: Listing 18.1 is BUILD.BAT, the batch file used to build QLIFE; Listing 18.2 is LCOMP.C, the program used to generate the assembler code and data file QLIFE.ASM; Listing 18.3 is MAIN.C, the main program for QLIFE; Listing 18.4 is VIDEO.C, the video-related functions, and Listing 18.5 is LIFE.H, the header file. The following sidebar contains David&rsquo;s build instructions, exactly as he wrote them. I certainly won&rsquo;t have room to discuss all the marvelous intricacies of David&rsquo;s code; I suggest you look over these listings until you understand them thoroughly (it took me a day to pick them apart) because there&rsquo;s a lot of neat stuff in there, and it&rsquo;s an approach to performance programming that operates at a more efficient, tightly integrated level than you may ever see again. One hint: It helps a <I>lot</I> to build and run LCOMP.C, redirect its output to QLIFE.ASM, and look at the assembly code in that file. This code is the entirety of David&rsquo;s generation engine, and it&rsquo;s almost impossible to visualize its operation without actually seeing it.</P>
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<font face="Verdana,sans-serif" size="1">Graphics Programming Black Book &copy; 2001 Michael Abrash</font>
Graphics Programming Black Book &copy; 2001 Michael Abrash
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