Garen Parham wrote:
> Yeah it doesn't do hardly anything at all for optimization.  But with other
> compilers not getting even close without any optimization settings turned
> on it seems they can do way better.

Eliminating intermediate structures speeds up compilation immensely, but also eliminates the possiblity of optimisation. Optimising compilers still need to build all their complicated intermediates, even if they're not optimising at the moment.

> I've heard LCC was a good compiler to study but haven't read/used it.
> Have done some cursory browsing and it and the Zephyr/NCI projects
> seem pretty cool but look like they're dead.

And they're loose frameworks, not directly usable on x86. I bet you're not aware of this one:
http://cocom.sourceforge.net/
(russian compiler/interpreter infrastructure)

LCC works on x86, but it comes from Microsoft Research. The license is friendly to scientific/non-profit uses of it though.
I bet .NET internals are similar to it.

-i.