Re: Fixing Bugs (Was: A Suggestion for Release Testing)

[chris jefferson <caj at cs dot york dot ac dot uk>]

Scott Robert Ladd wrote:

> Richard Guenther wrote:
>  
>
> > Take a break and come back with results of actual work done,
> > this impresses people a lot more than (repeated) ranting about
> > gcc development in general.
> >    
>
> I have worked on GCC; not much, and probably trivial in your eyes,
> but practical work nonetheless. To trivialize contributions is a great
> way of driving away potential contributors.
>
> I would like to improve floating-point in GCC; doing so scratches my
> personal itch. My silly idea is to determine the best approach
> *through discussion*.
>
>  
One thing I have come across, both in gcc and in other projects, is that 
often discussion is not the best option, but instead just writing some 
code is better.

It's very easy to have discussions go around in circles about if option 
a or option b is better, and which will lead to slowdowns, or intrusive 
changes, or whatever. It's very hard to know how well something will 
actually work, and if it will be possible, until it's actually been 
written. While it's briefly annoying to write code which then isn't used 
the first time you do it, I've quickly learned it's faster and easier 
than extensive discussions, and most good code will go through 3 or 4 
iterations before it finally settles, and need a whole bundle of tests 
writing, so writing an initial test version is not actually that big a 
time investment compared to the total amount of time something will 
take. Working code is also of course by far the most convincing argument 
:).

I have 4 completely different implementations of std::tr1::tuple lying 
around somewhere, obviously only one was actually used, but the only 
real way to know which would be best was to just write them and see how 
they looked and worked.

Chris