Re: Live range splitting in new allocator

[Russ Allbery <rra at stanford dot edu>]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> writes:

> That's my personal opinion too, but gcc has long had the rule that the
> presense or absense of "-g" should not affect code generation, only
> debugging information. And too many people seem to think that "-O2 -g"
> is a valid combination and should be debuggable.

Isn't this coming, originally, out of a policy decision?

I've wondered about this a little in the past and had it explained to me
that this is actually a side effect of a conscious decision to have the
default installation for all GNU software be debuggable, in the name of
helping users have more control over their environment and be able to
participate in the process of creating the software.

Because giving up optimization to achieve this goal would result in slower
and measurably poorer software, which would be bad for general adoption of
the GNU system, my understanding was that a high priority was placed on
getting optimization to work with debugging so that one could both have
fast code and maintain the ability of the end user to aid with the
debugging.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>