Re: [RFC] Our release cycles are getting longer

[Marcin Dalecki <martin at dalecki dot de>]

WiadomoÅÄ napisana w dniu 2007-01-24, o godz10:12, przez Michael  
Veksler:

> >
> Andrew, you are both correct and incorrect. Certainly,  
> deterministic unit testing
> is not very useful. However, random unit testing is priceless. I  
> have been doing
> pseudo-random unit tests for years, believe me it makes your code  
> practically
> bug free.

However the problem with applying this kind of methods to GCC would  
actually be finding
the units inside the spaghetti. Even a curious look at for example  
how -ffast-math works
did give me recently a run from the compiler 'driver' down to the c4x  
back-end.
An trivial attempt at doing something about it resulted in a request  
for a "full
bootstrap without regressions" for a platform:

1. which can't be bootstrapped at all
2. can't by nature run the test-suite
3. isn't in good shape overall.

Thus the small bolt against a layering violation will remain simply  
unplugged.
The intention was of course to look at how move stuff, which simply
doesn't belong to the scope of a compilation unit a bit more in the  
direction
of the #pragma level. There is after all enough of stuff sitting  
inside bugzilla, that
actually pertains to a request for a #pragma STDC_C99 implementation.

That was a code path example. I'm not going to start about the data.
The polymorphism by preprocessor macro/GTY fun of some(all?) crucial  
data types
makes me think that the whole MFC stuff looks sleek and elegant...

â Marcin Dalecki â