Re: [Patch] Fix istream::ignore + minor things

[Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr at integrable-solutions dot net>]

Nathan Myers <ncm-nospam@cantrip.org> writes:

[...]

| Second, compiler core people seem very sensitive to whether a feature
| is actually used in the code they encounter (typically in bug reports)
| before they put any time into improving their implementation of that
| feature.  At the moment, they probably hardly ever see branch prediction 
| attributes, because its expression isn't portable.  If we start using 
| them heavily in our library, the compiler people will be more likely 
| to start paying them some attention.

This is very selffulfilling.  It is not like they don't care.
I distinctly remember that this thingy had been discussed with
compiler people, especially with RTH (implementor).  Furthermore, Matt
also asked and suggested (if beneficial) to start using it in the
compiler itself.  It is not like, we just discovered it and the
compiler people did not know about it and its uses -- you may want to
grep the compiler source itself.

| Once such annotations actually
| help, then users will start using them in their own code too, and a
| some ISO committee might then feel obliged to make it portable.  

like computed gotos, or old lovely-regretted GGC's named return value
syntax, for example. 

| This isn't a call to start annotating all conditionals, wholesale.
| Practically, I think this means that for bits of code that we already
| *know* are very commonly inlined in inner loops, we shouldn't demand 
| complete benchmark tests on all architecures before we welcome patches 
| to annotate those.

On the contrary I'm of the strong opinion that we should ask for data
and carefully consider the issues. 

(And I would add for completeness, as they say, there are lies, dead
lies and benchmarks)

-- Gaby