A quick summary of gcc compilation speed from a political point of view

[Marc Espie <espie at nerim dot net>]

>From the little discussion that I inadvertently started, I believe I can
start to draw conclusions.

There is a large number of people who apparently do not care at all that
gcc is getting slower, because they say that we can buy faster hardware,
and gcc is not getting slower THAT fast.

If that's the consensus, it would be a good idea to seriously amend the
GCC description.

Because I don't think GCC fits its former description.

If that's true, and speed doesn't count that much, then GCC has become
a compiler that can should only be hosted on ix86 systems.

All over systems are either becoming too expensive or too slow for almost
anyone... Frankly, I don't really see myself getting a distcc farm of
sparc64 machines in the future...

So, the target audience of GCC consists of:
- people who want native ix86 compilers that create good code;
- people who want a cross-compiler for another system that's hosted on an
ix86.


Other combinations don't look reasonable to me.   In any case, when I
pointed out other combinations that looked useful and that would be nice to
have, I completely got shooted down by various people, stating cost issues,
or the excellence of GCC as a cross-compiler.

[ From personal experience, I can tell you that cross-compiling an entire
distribution is hard, and yields a whole other set of bugs to fix.
I can also tell you that native compiling the same distribution on a little
used system will invariably expose bugs that are not visible in a
cross-compiling setting. ]


But that's not the point.

The point is that, right now, GCC is each day becoming more unusable as a
compiler on any host that isn't ix86.


-- 
	Marc