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Re: GCC 4.1: Buildable on GHz machines only?
- From: Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha at gcc dot gnu dot org>
- To: Daniel Berlin <dberlin at dberlin dot org>
- Cc: Steven Bosscher <s dot bosscher at student dot tudelft dot nl>, Scott Robert Ladd <scott dot ladd at coyotegulch dot com>, Robert Dewar <dewar at adacore dot com>, Peter Barada <peter at the-baradas dot com>, Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot COM, hjl at lucon dot org, aph at redhat dot com, aoliva at redhat dot com, dje at watson dot ibm dot com, schwab at suse dot de, pinskia at physics dot uc dot edu, pkoning at equallogic dot com, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org, matt at 3am-software dot com, cow at compsoc dot man dot ac dot uk
- Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 17:15:51 +0100
- Subject: Re: GCC 4.1: Buildable on GHz machines only?
- References: <17009.2368.986169.753001@cuddles.cambridge.redhat.com> <1116249726.13457.49.camel@pc960.cambridge.arm.com> <4288B3FA.40706@coyotegulch.com> <200505161717.31407.s.bosscher@student.tudelft.nl> <1116258837.13457.68.camel@pc960.cambridge.arm.com> <1116259405.7722.1.camel@dyn9002218215>
On Mon, 2005-05-16 at 17:03, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> > if only it were that simple[1]. However, even if the money does get
> > spent it's unlikely to help because there are too many developers that
> > just DON'T CARE about (or worse, seem to be openly hostile to) making
> > the compiler more efficient.
>
> They don't care because nobody pays them to care (IE you've got it
> backwards), and they have other higher priority spare time projects that
> they like to work on.
>
It shouldn't be necessary to pay every developer to care. We need to
buy into the fact that if some of the developer community cares enough
to pay for the work to be done, then doing things that undo that work
are going to be unpopular. That is, we should treat increases in memory
usage/slow-downs in the compiler as regressions in the same way as we
treat worse code as regressions. That's the only way we'll ever get
serious about this. Unless and until we can accept this then nobody is
going to put money into it, because it'll just be wasted money.
> If you want to change the priorities of paid developers, you will have
> to do so by affecting the work they are paid to do, not by trying to
> convince them that speeding up the compiler is better than whatever
> hobby projects they enjoy working on. This is because speeding up the
> compiler is almost never an enjoyable hobby project :).
I'm fully aware of this fact. It doesn't change things though. If we
are serious about engineering a good compiler, then we need to be just
as serious about these issues.
R.