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Re: GCC 4.1: Buildable on GHz machines only?
On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 16:40 -0700, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> Daniel Berlin <dberlin@dberlin.org> writes:
>
> > On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 15:13 -0700, Stan Shebs wrote:
> >> Steven Bosscher wrote:
> >> >If someone had cared about them, it would have been noticed
> >> >earlier. But since _nobody_ has complained before you, I guess we
> >> >can conclude that by far the majority if GCC users are quite happy
> >> >with the cost assesments that were made.
> >> >
> >> No, there have been plenty of complaints, but the GCC mailing lists
> >> have, shall we say, a "reputation", and a great many users will not
> >> post to them,
> >
> > I've never in my life heard this from another mailing list, and i
> > contribute to a *great* many open source projects.
>
> I have seen such complaints. Not about bootstrap times, no, that only
> affects people who compile the compiler; but the more general case of
> 'gcc takes forever to compile this program' does appear on a regular
> basis.
People would complain even if the compiler took 1 second on every file,
regardless of size or optimization level.
If you want a faster compiler, it's hard work. It means not adding
features because the design isn't a good one, *even if the user would
still find it useful*. People aren't willing to do this. It means lots
and lots of profiling, and taking care of little inefficiencies. All I
ever see people suggest is magic bullets.
We also have some deep datastructure problems in terms of IL, but those
aren't going to give us a 5000% speedup or be a magic bullet either.
--Dan