ia64 meeting minutes

[Robert Schweikert <rjschwei at mindspring dot com>]

> Suneel Jain:  GCC does not support Fortran-90, so technical computing
isn't as much of an issue for GCC.

This assumption is incorrect. The interfacing of GCC with proprietary
Fortran compilers is important and makes GCC viable for technical
computing. Databases (results storage) are often implemented in C++ for
which GCC might be the compiler of choice. Thus the performance of the
code compiled with GCC is very important.

> Bill Savage:  Linux kernel performance should be a high priority.
Behind that is general applications and database software, and
>  behind that is technical computing, which is lower because there
might be other compilers available for those applications.

What are general aplications and why are they so important? When I think
of general applications I think of word processors, spreadsheets etc.
The "performance" of this type of software is highly user dependent, as
they are interactive products. I don't know of anyone who can out type a
200 MHz IA32 processor, it appears that any code generated for these
types of applications will be fast enough. Technical computing, with
lots of number crunching and data storage is where performance is of
high priority and thus this should be higher on the list.

There are other compilers for database  and general applications
software too, fact is that GCC is the default compiler for Linux,
potentially interfaced with a comercial Fortran compiler, see above, and
it would be nice to see that this is taken a bit more seriously with
respect to technical computing performance.

My $0.02 worth

Robert

--
Robert Schweikert                      MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU
rjschwei@mindspring.com                         LINUX