Re: gcc 3.5 integration branch proposal

[Eric Botcazou <ebotcazou at libertysurf dot fr>]

> My goodness, I would not even *consider* asking a professional developer
> (someone whose time is worth in the region of $1000 a day to a typical
> company) to use this low end machine. So we sure have totally different
> perspectives.

Sorry, I was imprecise.  I wanted to say that, from your viewpoint as a 
professional developer based in the US, this is certainly "a pretty 
reasonable machine at a very reasonable price".

> A home machine that costs $400 seems to me to be a reasonable definition
> of reasonable hardware. Note that we are not saying that gcc won't work
> at all on slower smaller machines, just that we expect relatively poor
> performance on such machines. If your valuation of your time is that you
> would rather put up with this poor performance than spend the $400
> that's certainly of course quite reasonable.

Again, I think this is a somewhat biased reasoning.  But I understand your 
viewpoint.

> Note that I did not say *only* by professionals, but to distort the
> project to say that all code must compile efficiently on machines that
> are three years old seems a mistake to me. Furthermore I think it will
> be counterproductive in improving peformance, since it is an unrealistic
> requirement.

Let's face it: from the user viewpoint (all is in the viewpoint :-), during 
the past few years, GCC has exchanged a reasonably good code quality coupled 
with a good compilation speed for a slightly better code quality and a 
catastrophic compilation speed.  Maybe this indicates that there is 
something wrong in the development process.

-- 
Eric Botcazou