Re: Linus on "regparm"

[Carlo Wood <carlo at runaway dot xs4all dot nl>]

| ---------- Forwarded message ----------
| Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1998 11:18:47 -0700 (PDT)
| From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
| Cc: linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu
| Subject: Re: pre egcs-1.1 testing and Linux 2.1.x
| 
| I wanted to just clarify the issue of egcs and Linux-2.1.x.
| 
| I know that gcc has had problems with "regparm". However, I'm rather
| disgusted with some egcs people who say "we have problems and they will
| never get fixed". I don't personally believe in that kind of development
| behaviour, and if it's true it is really sad.
| 
| I will continue to use "regparm" for the specific functions where I think
| there's a noticeable win (either in performance or simplicity - when
| mixing assembly and C the regparm calling convention can be much nicer to
| use). And I hope that not all egcs people consider it impossible to fix
| bugs, and that some of them will be instead more motivated to fix the
| problems than to ignore them.
...
| 			Linus

Linus, please realize that there are only about 6 or so people capable
of working on egcs, which is really a damn complex piece of code :/.
These people really work their asses off and I think they deserve
only a "thank you" for all the work they put into the compiler.
I think that it is a matter of priority (and lack of time), not a
matter of ignoring bugs.

I really wish I will be able to use egcs to compile the kernel, and
I understand that you don't want to use workarounds because egcs has
a bug; so yes - it needs to be fixed - and people need to be motivated
to fix it.

You won't get people motivated with mails like the above :/.

-- 
 Carlo Wood  <carlo@runaway.xs4all.nl>