Re: Of Bounties and Mercenaries

[kaih at khms dot westfalen dot de (Kai Henningsen)]

hahn@physics.mcmaster.ca (Mark Hahn)  wrote on 03.04.04 in <Pine.LNX.4.44.0404031440350.24108-100000@coffee.psychology.mcmaster.ca>:

> >     A program is compiled once but executed 100000 times.
> >
> > True, but that's often not relevant to developers, who care about how
> > quickly they can compile their applications.
>
> GCC *IS* quite fast.

GCC is usually fast enough for me.

OTOH, just about every compiler seems to be faster.

> people still complain about it: is it not true that those who do are
> using grotesquely bloated app frameworks?  is there any value to PCH,
> other than pandering to people who deliberately choose to arrange
> their code into vast mazes of twisty headers?

Or to people who *use* those frameworks but didn't design them?

(And when I think of stuff like the Win32 API, MacOS X/Cocoa or even  
traditional MacOS (these days known as Carbon), I'll say that *not*  
organizing that stuff into lots of header files would have been even  
*more* insane. And I suspect you wouldn't be all that happy with a single  
posix.h header, either.)

Oh, and all the above don't even use significant amounts of inline code.

> consider an alternative: link-time, whole-program optimization.  this
> removes much of the need to have so much code inlined, and offers far more
> optimization opportunity than the all-inline-PCH approach.  and it would
> benefit *everyone*, not just header-o-philes.

Sure they might be nice, but I don't see how they'd even touch the header  
problem. See above.

MfG Kai