Performance of egcs on Alpha hardware

[Toon Moene <toon at moene dot indiv dot nluug dot nl>]

I wonder if everyone saw this in comp.os.linux.alpha:

<quote>

It seems I wrote without knowledge about a few things in my last  
post. According to Jon "maddog" Hall, DEC engineers have looked into  
accelerating egcs, and reached the following conclusions:

     The answer [to the question of performance difference between
     DEC and egcs compilers] lies more in the fact that the DEC
     compilers start their optimizations far up in the front end of
     the compiler, not just in the final optimization steps.  One
     of my colleagues in the Alpha Migration Tools group thinks
     that the egcs compiler is actually doing almost the best it
     can without massive changes to the front ends of the compiler,
     which would allow it to pass down some of this information to
     the optimizer.

The reason for DEC's interest in accelerating egcs (also from Jon  
Hall) is that it is often used by customers in comparison  
benchmarks, and so poor performance reflects badly on the alpha  
platform as a whole, resulting in the loss of BIG system sales.

</quote>

It would be interesting to know what they meant by "massive changes  
to the front end" of the (Fortran) compiler.

Anyone in the know ?

Cheers,
Toon.