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Re: gcc 3.5 integration branch proposal
Scott Robert Ladd wrote:
On the other hand, it is unwise for GCC to ignore compile speed, under
the assumption that people can just buy a faster machine or more RAM.
Not everyone is as fortunate as we...
But such generalities are not really useful unless quantified. Let's try
to define a machine which is reasonable as an expectation for anyone
doing serious software development. Reasonable in the sense that if
someone is trying to use a less capable machine we won't get too upset
if the performance is poor.
Here is a suggestion:
For $399 you can buy from Dell a brand new Dimension 2400 with a 2.4GHz
Celeron, 400MHz front bus, 256 meg of memory, 40GB disk, 17" monitor,
and 48x CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive.
That's a pretty reasonable machine at a very reasonable price. I know
it's a little ahead of what some people might have, but I think it is
still a reasonable benchmark machine. Basically the viewpoint is that
if you have such a machine, then until we upgrade the baseline, no one
is allowed to tell you that it's your fault for having too slow a
machine that gcc performs poorly :-)
(it's a hundred bucks more to get a Pentium-4 with a 533Mhz bus, but I
think it's reasonable to go with the absolute low end here. After all
that machine is still a thousand times faster than the PC-1 and has a
thousand times more memory than the PC-1. For those who really want to
splurge, an extra $200 will get you a 17" flat panel, but somehow I
don't think that will help gcc performance much!)