Of Bounties and Mercenaries

[Scott Robert Ladd <coyote at coyotegulch dot com>]

What to do, what to do: On one hand, we have a user community that needs 
improvements in GCC, but who is not paying anyone to do such work. On 
the other hand, we have the GCC developers who often lament the number 
of bugs and regressions that go unpatched.

Shall the twain ever meet?

It seems to me that both sides have the same problem: They want 
something done, but no one is paying for it. So GCC continues to have 
serious bugs, and many users are unhappy, and some unfaithful have begun 
having concourse with -- dare I say it? -- commercial compilers that 
satisfy their needs.

While I would prefer an altruistic world, I have family and animals to 
feed; my teenage daughters devour whole pizzas in a single gulp, while 
my iguana alone eats an entire produce section every week. I'm certain 
we all have our little obligations for rent, power, and other such 
"necessities."

So in whose vested interest is it to make GCC even better? Who will pay 
to make it better, stronger, and faster?

Perhaps we should vote with our pocketbooks. Bugs and feature requests 
could be tracked by value, as defined by the amount of money people 
commit on behalf of such requests. Users could "weight" their vote with 
cold, hard cash to attract the proper mercenary mindset.

Of course, such a model *does* cut out those people who have great need 
but little cash or small markets. If I develop for an embedded system, 
for example, I might offer $100 to request repair of some bug that 
annoys me -- but if a thousand people pay $10 each to fix something for 
the ia32, my poor embedded system will be out-of-luck, I think.

Ah, but no one really cares about those "fringe" systems, when the 
majority of people (the only really *important* ones) use Intel and AMD 
processors running Linux. And if no one's paying (for example) to 
improve floating-point speed and accuracy, it must not be important, eh? 
Anything important *must* have a dollar value attached, according to 
some GCC developers.

Perhaps we could invoke quotas -- for every "popular" bug fixed, the GCC 
developers would have to fix some other, less popular bug. Affirmative 
action for less-popular platforms, bugs, and requests!

How to make a buck and still take care of minority needs? An age old 
question, to be certain.

--
Scott Robert Ladd
Coyote Gulch Productions (http://www.coyotegulch.com)
Software Invention for High-Performance Computing