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Re: Of Bounties and Mercenaries
Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
Floating point performance is an example of a an issue so diffuse that
nobody feels responsible for fixing it. On the other hand, Red Hat
and others (or perhaps a silent backer) are investing a great deal of
money in the tree-ssa reworking of gcc infrastructure, so this sort of
general overhaul is indeed possible.
In general, numericists may not be in a good position to influence GCC
development. Coming from academic and government sources, they can have
trouble allocating funds for soemthing like "improving GCC," as it is
not part of their specific mandate.
One reason I'm educating myself about tree-ssa is so I can work on
gfortran, a project unlikely to excite much fervor inside the halls of
Red Hat and SuSE. The numerical market is small, and Fortran 95 poorly
understood and appreciated outside its (surprisingly large) community.
Part of the problem is that gcc has become sufficiently complex that
it is difficult for the uninitiated to fix a bug. Thus gcc partially
loses one of the usual advantages of free software--the fact that bugs
can be fixed by people with an itch to scratch.
I completely agree; tree-ssa is, in my mind, easier to work with and
understand. I've looked at working on GCC PRs,a nd simply haven't the
time to invest in understanding the non-tree-ssa architecture. The
complexity of GCC makes it very difficult for people to simply jump in
and help out.
--
Scott Robert Ladd
Coyote Gulch Productions (http://www.coyotegulch.com)
Software Invention for High-Performance Computing