An issue for the SC: horrible documentation quality of GCC

[Richard Kenner]

    > Perhaps, but a lot of that complexity is *needed*.  The reason that GCC
    > has historically beaten other compilers in code quality is paying
    > attention to important heuristics and less on "textbook" material.
    > Sure the latter is also critical, but the pragmatics cannot be ignored.

    the problem with this approach is that you will eventually end up with
    an uncomprehensible piece of code where everything depends on everything
    and you cannot do a simplest change without everything else falling
    apart.

Obviously, that's not desirable, but I don't see why it necessarily follows
from taking a pragmatic approach to optimizations.

    GCSE is basically machine independent, so there should not be a need for
    it to take machine-dependent issues into accout. These dependencies
    should be isolated in a few later passses that can take care of the
    issues you mention without harming each other.

Here I don't follow you.  *All* of the optimizers are written in a style
of being machine-independent but take into account machine-dependent
parameterizations.  Are you claiming that somehow this should not be true
for gcse?