GCC viciously beaten by ICC in trig test!

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

Paolo Carlini <pcarlini@suse.de> writes:

| In my previous message, however, I forgot one important extension and
| you are
| the best person to shed light on it: extern template. What's that? Could we
| renounce to it?

There are two points of history here:
  (1) in the dark ages, "extern template" was supposed to provide a
      form of separate compilation of templates -- in fact, 
      that syntax was rumored along with "export"; there were long,
      "heated" debates, and in final, "export" syntax won.  Note too,
      that "export" or "extern template" can in only after some "radical"
      positions were operated (some implementors adopted to replace
      the kind of separate compilation provided by CFront with the
      inclusion model championed in the Borland implementation.  I was
      told recently that it would be an MS extension actually).

  (2) In the current proposal for "extern template", it is just a way
      to tell the compiler not to instantiate right now from an
      arbitraty template definition that would be around.  It is
      essentially a mean to forward declare an explicit instantiation.

We use "extern templates" only as code-size optimization.  It could be
removed without damage.

There are cases where a form of "extern template" is needed, we don't
have those cases in the library as currently implemented.

-- Gaby