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Re: GCC 4.1: Buildable on GHz machines only?
Ian Lance Taylor <ian@airs.com> wrote:
>> Except it's not just bootstrapping GCC. It's everything. When the
>> NetBSD Project switched from 2.95.3 to 3.3, we had a noticeably
>> increase in time to do the "daily" builds because the 3.3 compiler
>> was so much slower at compiling the same OS source code. And we're
>> talking almost entirely C code, here.
>
> Well, there are two different issues. Matt was originally talking
> about bootstrap time, at least that is how I took it. You are talking
> about speed of compilation. The issues are not unrelated, but they
> are not the same.
>
> The gcc developers have done a lot of work on speeding up the compiler
> for 3.4 and 4.0, with some success. On many specific test cases, 4.0
> is faster than 3.3 and even 2.95. The way to help this process along
> is to report bugs at http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla.
>
> In particular, if you provide a set of preprocessed .i files, from,
> say, sys, libc, or libcrypto, whichever seems worst, and open a gcc PR
> about them, that would be a great baseline for measuring speed of
> compilation, in a way that particularly matters to NetBSD developers.
I would also like to note that I *myself* requested preprocessed source code to
NetBSD developers at least 6 times in the past 2 years. I am sure Andrew Pinski
did too, a comparable amound of times. These requests, as far as I can
understand, were never answered. This also helped building up a stereotype of
the average NetBSD developer being "just a GCC whine troll".
I am sure this is *far* from true, but I would love to see NetBSD developers
*collaborating* with us, especially since what we are asking (filing bug
reports with preprocessed sources) cannot take more than 1-2 hours of their
time.
Giovanni Bajo