Re: Of Bounties and Mercenaries

[Mark Hahn <hahn at physics dot mcmaster dot ca>]

>     A program is compiled once but executed 100000 times. 
> 
> True, but that's often not relevant to developers, who care about how
> quickly they can compile their applications.

GCC *IS* quite fast.  

people still complain about it: is it not true that those who do are 
using grotesquely bloated app frameworks?  is there any value to PCH,
other than pandering to people who deliberately choose to arrange 
their code into vast mazes of twisty headers?

consider an app framework where everything that the developer is trying 
to work n resides in inter-dependent header files with boatloads of inline code.
OK, inlining is a great feaure which presents the compiler with more
opportunities to optimize;  the problem is all the reparsing, is it not?

consider an alternative: link-time, whole-program optimization.  this 
removes much of the need to have so much code inlined, and offers far more 
optimization opportunity than the all-inline-PCH approach.  and it would 
benefit *everyone*, not just header-o-philes.

was link-time (delayed) optimization considered as a more powerful
alternative to PCH?  was it rejected because of the usual paranoia about 
someone hijacking an internal compiler representation?

at my HPC center, runtime speed is somewhere between 5e3 and 2e9 more 
important than compile speed (median is probably 2e5.)

regards, mark hahn.