some remarks about gcc4.0

[Mark Mitchell]

tbp wrote:

> But my concern wasn't that this particular bug got fixed sometime but
> how the still-brittle-x86-SSE code gen. would affect (or not) gcc4.0
> release; i must say that i'm particularly ignorant of gcc release
> protocol.

IA32 is an important platform for GCC.  Performance is important for 
GCC. IA32 performance is important for GCC.  However, IA32 SSE 
performance is just one kind of performance.

The reason we use "regressions" as a release criteria is to try to keep 
from getting worse from one release to the next; we know that if we do 
that, we'll actually be getting better, because we know that we're 
improving things all the time.  So, we'll make an effort to fix problems 
with IA32 SSE code generation that were not present in previous releases 
-- but we'd probably not worry about shipping GCC 4.0 just because there 
were missed optimizations that had also been missed in the past.

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304