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Re: How to understand gcc source code?
On Saturday 22 March 2008 11:14, Basile STARYNKEVITCH wrote:
> Actually you ask an interesting & difficult question. Some thoughts from
> somebody who works on GCC for more than a year but still considers
> himself a newbie:
>
> * my impression is that nobody understands fully the GCC compiler. Maybe
> there are some few exceptions, but I tend to believe that most of GCC
> contributors (in particular myself) do not understand all of it, and had
> to give up the idea of grasping it all! As usual, the way to go into it
> is abstraction: you agree to not understand fully some stuff, and you
> abstract it.
Cons of such an approach: the project as a whole becomes somewhat unmanaged
(unmanageable?) and sometimes accumulates unneeded layers of abstraction
and other random cruft without anyone noticing/caring about it.
Your example of MS Windows is a prime one of overgrown project
out of human control.
> * on the positive side, GCC is still doing well and alive
Then why LLVM (at least is said to) surpass gcc in generated code's quality?
Why Intel and MS compilers are surpassing it?
Sorry for "negative" comment, but burying your head in the sand
and pretending that everything is ok does not seem like
a good strategy to me.
--
vda