Re: GCC's hardware requirements - Where is the freedom? [was: Re: gcc 3.5 integration branch proposal]

[Andrew Pinski <pinskia at physics dot uc dot edu>]

On Jan 19, 2004, at 16:01, Matthias Benkmann wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 21:21:34 +0100 Eric Botcazou
> <ebotcazou@libertysurf.fr> wrote:
>
> > > That's a pretty reasonable machine at a very reasonable price.
> >
> > For a professional developer based in the US, certainly.  I'm not sure
> > GCC should primarily target such a population though.
>
> I think that is an *excellent* point considering which countries seem 
> to
> be the major adopters of free software these days. GNU was once about
> freedom and, unfortunate as that may be, freedom is often tied to 
> money.
> If a student in a developing country can't have a free (as in 
> "freedom")
> ANSI C++ compiler because it doesn't work reasonably on the 
> 500MHz/128MB
> RAM machine that is the pride of his school (This is a GREAT machine.
> There are even schools in Western countries that are below this level 
> for
> lack of money.), this means he can't have a free (as in "freedom") ANSI
> C++ compiler at all.


Freedom also us to do what ever we want, not I do not say this is good
or bad because it can be both in this case.  We are trying to fix this
performance/memory problems, it takes time to fix them, if you are going
to complain, at least file one or two bugs showing your problem, we love
bugs (really it is only me who loves them dearly but I would love to 
have
all the bugs in GCC fixed, there are 1200 or so bugs).  Bugs are the 
real
way to get your point across and show that you really care about GCC, we
are getting more and more memory/compile time problems every day now.
Remember some of use judge how well GCC is doing by the bug count, not 
by
actually experience.


> Free software that requires a machine that most people in 3rd world
> countries cannot afford IS NOT FREE (as in "freedom"), even if it is
> distributed under the GPL. GCC is at the very heart of the GNU system 
> and
> the free software world. There will be more and more free software
> projects that require new GCC versions. This means that there will be 
> more
> and more projects that are off-limits for a large group of people, if
> GCC's hardware requirements continue to rise.


Freedom for GCC comes in two forms, freedom to write the optimizations 
you want
and to speed up/optimize the memory usage.  Most people who are using 
GCC usually
do not care for the speed or memory usage usually, they want their code 
to run
faster.  Again filling bugs lets us gauge which one we as GCC 
developers do, please
please file bugs for what stuff you want, make sure you have a testcase 
also, because
I will close bugs without testcases or very easy to figure out what is 
going wrong.

> I get the impression that several GCC developers work on GCC for the 
> wrong
> reasons (at least from the GNU perspective). This discussion about GCC
> requirements is symptomatic of the problem addressed in the very 
> beginning
> of

Some of developer for GCC for themselves because they feel that GCC was 
lacking
so they want to improve it, this is one freedom that the FSF wants to 
be happening.
Not the FREEDOM of giving away software but the freedom to improve it.  
Remember some
of us developers like doing this for a hobby and do not work for a 
company at all.

> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
>
> "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social
> movement."

Yes the social movement to be allow the changing of sources the way fit 
and
redistribute them and the source for the next person to do the same.
See the different here is that you are thinking economical terms rather 
the true
meaning of what the FSF stands for.


> As GCC still sails under the FSF's flag I think that the social aspect
> must not be ignored. If Apple decides to ship a GCC that requires an
> up-to-date PowerMac to run that's perfectly okay, but for the official
> main branch distributed by the FSF I believe that this is simply not an
> option as it would go against the principles on which it was founded.

Again the social aspect is for the changing of the source and letting 
the next
guy do the same rather than the economical terms which is what you are 
thinking of.
Basically the FSF was founded to support the freedoms that RMS stood 
for and the
software products.


> Please keep GCC "free" as in "freedom", even if that means sacrificing
> resources to satisfy the needs of the underprivileged who can not 
> afford
> to pay for this development.

The free means you can still go out and change the source that we give 
you.  And
when you distribute those binaries, you also distribute the source 
along to give
to the next guy so that he can do the same to someone else.  The FSF is 
only set up
to support the official sources that the copyrights have been given to 
the FSF, the
maintainers see fit what goes in.  Some times what goes in slows the 
compiler but
other times some patches are rejected because they increase the compile 
time speed
too much.  One patch I know of is the VRP patch which was rejected 
because it increased
the compile time and did not give that much benefit.

</rant>

Thanks,
Andrew Pinski