Re: Of Bounties and Mercenaries

[Stelios Xanthakis <sxanth at ceid dot upatras dot gr>]

On Fri, 2 Apr 2004, Scott Robert Ladd wrote:

> Tom Lord wrote:
> > Instead of bounties and mercenaries, a model which has occaisional
> > success but a long track record of that success being very limited and
> > narrowly focused, may I suggest instead the OSDL model?
> 
> The OSDL is an excellent model -- but it does beg one question. Mr. 
> Torvalds is now in their employ, and the Linux folk have long been 
> grumpy about GCC compile times. I wonder is OSDL has or will fund 
> efforts toward improveing compiler speed?
> 

Compiler speed *should not* be an issue. If gcc 3.5 is ten times
slower compiling programs at -O2, that's a good thing: it means
that it does more to procude better code. A program is compiled
once but executed 100000 times. So compile-time is *not* an issue
and it would be wrong if gcc developers dropped features because
they slow compile speed.

What would be nice is to be able to compile applications with -O0 while
developping and testing them and with -O2 for the final executable
(the one that will be used 100000 times).

Unfortunatelly this doesn't work. A progam that works at -O0 may
reveal bugs at -O2. If you could guarantee that ``if something is
ok at -O0 is also ok in -O2'' that'd be a real win.

Apart from that, i think it's up to the application progammer
to write code that does not require -O2, can be tested at -O0
and use valgrind on it.

gcc developers *should* completely ignore comments about the speed
of gcc. Do you get paid to improve the speed? No. Application
programmers should write good code. If a big corp has incompetent
people and expects from gcc to get faster at -O2, they can hire
a filthy bounty hunter ;)