Re: Patch to allow Ada to work with tree-ssa

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm at polyomino dot org dot uk>]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2004, Paolo Bonzini wrote:

> [Moved to gcc]
> 
> > When I first started working with computers, a high-end machine cost 52
> > *years* of typical salaries.  Now we're talking about well under a week's
> > salary to buy the fastest possible machine (perhaps as little as a day).
> 
> The first part is just statistics.  With the second, I cannot but disagree.

Likewise.  Even the smaller income figure implied feels like something
from another world - albeit certainly a desirable one - by a substantial
factor, the larger one even more so.  (But I do not claim knowledge of GCC
developer or user salaries, typical or otherwise, to say whether in fact
the claim is statistically true.)

(Even were hardware essentially free, I'd still feel it somewhat
profligate not to be very careful about CPU and memory consumption on
those grounds.  Even if bootstrap+testsuite times came down to ten seconds
through faster/cheaper hardware, some systems built with GCC would still
be large enough to take long enough to build that faster GCC would still
be useful.)

(One academic network I still have access to - not for GCC development,
though I have run parallel computations across it in the past (a special
case where for a final build compile time doesn't matter as the total run
time may be > 1 year, though for all normal development before a final
build compile time still does matter), and on which some users might
notice how much slower 3.2.2 is than EGCS 1.1.2 as software is upgraded
while hardware stays constant - consists I think still largely of machines
older / slower than 3 years old (800 MHz, a few still slower).)

> I'm a volunteer, and it takes me a few months to *save* 1200 Euros, 
> money that I'd like to save for other purposes (you know, holidays for 
> example :-).

 ..., language standards, committee participation costs (I understand some
National Bodies charge individual committee members to participate at
national level, without that there are still travel costs to meetings; for
those able to afford to go to international standards meetings the costs
would be much more), ...

-- 
Joseph S. Myers               http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
    jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
    jsm28@gcc.gnu.org (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)