Re: GCC 4.1: Buildable on GHz machines only?

[Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha at gcc dot gnu dot org>]

On Mon, 2005-05-16 at 13:44, Robert Dewar wrote:
> Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> 
> > Robert, please stop trying to shoot the messenger.  The problems are
> > real, and users often cannot 'fix' these problems themselves.  Just like
> > they can't 'fix' the compiler bloat themselves.
> 
> Right, but again, if developers make bad decisions about
> development environments, it is not clear that gcc should
> be trying to bail them out.

I didn't say it was the developers of the package, I said it was the
folks trying to *build* the package.  These are very often different
people in the open-source community.  The folks building the package are
restricted in whether or not they can do cross compilation by whether or
not the *developers* have built that facility into their package. 
Sadly, 90%[1] of the time they have not.


>  Personally, I would rather have
> a gcc generating better code and using more memory, than
> the other way round. Of course, there are limits, and the
> places that gcc uses unreasonable amounts of memory should
> be fixed. But making it a goal to compile in less than 256 megs
> seems dubious in days when any decently configured notebook
> should have at least a gig or memory (mine has 2 gigs).

I find this laughable.  Most desktop machines around here have between
512M and 1G.  And if I were lucky enough to own a laptop with 2G of
memory I'd want it to be used to avoid having to spin up the disk on a
regular basis, not as squander-resource for compiler developers who were
being too lazy to think through the consequences of their decisions.  
Anyway, with all that extra memory I'd rather be running multiple
parallel compilations than one single one that consumed all the RAM,
especially if I had a multi-core processor.

R.

[1] Random number, I've not measured it.  But I'd be very surprised if
it were less than this.