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Re: Experiencing unreproducible internal compiler errors <<whinge>>


On Mar 16, 2000, Matt Lowry <mclowry@cs.adelaide.edu.au> wrote:

> Does this look stressful on my machine?

Probably there are not so many inter-dependencies in the data being
processed that would cause any of these programs to crash or fail.
Did you check that all of the bzip2 sessions ended up producing the
same original data?  Did you check that both kernel builds produced
the same object files?  Are you sure there's no minor problem hiding
away in some of the xmame virtual machines?  Are you sure it's not
just luck?

The issue is that, if you can't repeat a compiler crash, odds are that
it's not a bug in the compiler.  There's not any source of randomness
in it that could cause it to crash only sometimes, given the same
input.  Every time I have found any such problem, and every time
someone reported such random crashes in GCC, we'd end up finding out
it was indeed a hardware problem, or kernel-induced instability.  It
may take more time to convince some people, but eventually they accept
the truth.  Sorry.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva    Enjoy Guaranį, see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Cygnus Solutions, a Red Hat company        aoliva@{redhat, cygnus}.com
Free Software Developer and Evangelist    CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp
oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}   Write to mailing lists, not to me


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