Assembler Optimizer

After a long time without any major release, I just uploaded a new version of MDL (v2.2) to GitHub: https://github.com/santiontanon/mdlz80optimizer/releases/tag...

Other than bug fixing and general improvements, the 2 major new things are:
- support for the extended instructions in z180 and z80next cpus
- significant improvements to the search-based optimizer (which is starting to generate more and more optimizations, finally!). As a result it became a bit slower to run (about 1 minute in my computer for a normal-sized project), but I know the bottleneck, and I'll work on this for next version.

Next I want to try to add the functionality we were discussing above to detect duplicated data blocks! (plus lots of small improvements on the search-based optimizer that I have in my list and didn't make it to this version)

I have tested the new version and indeed it produces more optimizations than before.

But I found new features of TNIASM that are not supported. I didn't use them in the previous version of the code.
The features in question are %if, %else, %endif

Here is a code example of it:

	%if	(GAME_VERSION == "2")
	ADD	A,0Ah
	%endif

	%if	(GAME_VERSION == "4")
	SUB	08h
	%else
	ADD A,0Ah
	%endif

Would be great to add support for them to the MDL.

---

Now, there is one more thing that I didn't use but also exists in TNIASM - macros.

Here is an example:

	%macro	ips_cls		%n , %n , %n	; start address, size, fill byte
	 %if (#1 > FFFFFFh) | (#2 > FFFFh) | (#3 > FFh)
	  %if (#1 > FFFFFFh) \ %error "ips_cls offset address is too big!" \ %endif \ %if (#2 > FFFFh) \ %error "ips_cls size is too big!" \ %endif \ %if (#3 > FFh) \ %error "ips_cls fill byte is too big!" \ %endif
	 %else
	  DB	(#1 / 10000h)
	  DB	(#1 / 100h) & FFh
	  DB	(#1 % 100h)
	  DW	0000h
	  DB	(#2 / 100h)
	  DB	(#2 % 100h)
	  DB	#3
	 %endif
	%endmacro

I assume it is harder to add macros to the MDL compare to other features, but maybe it would be possible in one of the future versions

Alright, al of those should be handled in the latest "dev" build: https://github.com/santiontanon/mdlz80optimizer/releases/tag...

(and also, the search-based optimizer should already be 30%-40% faster to execute, which is nice)

Oh, very nice paper!! Thanks! I'll make sure to read it! The abstract looks like it is EXACTLY what I'm trying to build here!

And yes! exactly! there is a "superoptimizer" inside of MDL that can be used in two ways: to generate code from scratch given a specification, or to optimize existing code. When used to optimize existing code, what it does it to go through the original code line by line, and take small blocks of code (by default "2 instructions at a time"), and exhaustively search all instruction combinations, trying to find a faster/shorter way to do the same. It is currently limited to only a subset of the z80 instruction set, but I'm expanding bit by bit.

Thanks for testing gdx! As for the output assembler file, you mean with the "-asm" flag? That flag takes a path as an argument. So, if you specified a filename, then yeah, I see it would have taken it as just saving it in whichever your current folder was

And yeah, the "end" symbol is special in many assemblers. Some assemblers fail if you use "end" as a label, hence if MDL finds such label, it renames it for safety. Which assembler are you using? Maybe I should see which of the currently supported dialects have troubles with "end", and leave the label be if you are using a dialect that has no troubles with it.