Handwritten asm still outperforms compiler output by enough to warrant its use in hot functions like AES-GCM.
(NaCl also uses a text-to-text transform system to output asm, although it's written in C and does register allocation too. The important aspect of NaCl is djb & friend's attention to quality.)
I feel like if you took something like qhasm and extended it to be a full language rather than sort of a hack, you would end up with something really beautiful, like Forth minus the crazy and plus both standard assembly and high level syntax. It could be a better C than C.
The Win64 versions are a little less optimal IIRC, but to be fair Win64 is dumb.
https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/+/master/crypto...
and in particular:
https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/+/master/crypto... and https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/+/master/crypto...
I don't see how this is any improvement on just writing plain assembler? Apart from the perl-style comments, is this any cleaner than say, some code compiled with yasm?
[ed: I guess what I'm missing is that there's probably more similarities between the x86 flavours and ARM flavours -- but I still think one would need to look at, and understand, the generated assembly for each platform in order to audit the code. So I still wonder a bit about what the gain is.]