GCC 4.1: Buildable on GHz machines only?

[Steven Bosscher]

On Monday 16 May 2005 17:53, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-05-16 at 16:17, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> > On Monday 16 May 2005 16:53, Scott Robert Ladd wrote:
> > > The problem is, a bloated GCC has no consequences for the majority of
> > > GCC developers -- their employers have other (and valid) concerns. It's
> > > less a matter of laziness than it is of not caring outside one's own
> > > backyard.
> >
> > And to second your point in an awkward way: I don't see this as a
> > problem.  If all those people who think this is a problem would
> > also fund GCC development (with hard cash or with developers), who
> > knows, probably things would look different.
>
> if only it were that simple[1].  However, even if the money does get
> spent it's unlikely to help because there are too many developers that
> just DON'T CARE about (or worse, seem to be openly hostile to) making
> the compiler more efficient.

I've not seen anyone who is hostile to the idea of making the compiler
more efficient.  But it is difficult to expect people to care about a
thing that is not a problem for them.  I think it _would_ help if there
were people working specifically on reducing e.g. the memory footprint.
It is not like we don't know where the problems are, there is just not
a soul who cares enough to fix these problems.  Most souls start caring
when there is a monetary compensation in it for them ;-)

> No company is going to spend money on fixing this until we adjust our
> (collective) attitude and take this seriously.

Agreed.

A lot of work has already been done on speeding up the compiler, but
we are not really going anywhere if we add 80+ tree passes and remove
nothing.  There is also a SUSE bot that posts to gcc-regressions if
the memory footprint has increased, but people are completely ignoring
it.

>  If one person can
> continue to undo the good work of a dozen others with one lousy commit
> we'll never get anywhere here.

I don't think people are deliberately sabotaging efforts to make GCC
faster/smaller/etc.  And there are rules for what is considered a
regression, and for what to do with patches that cause them.

Gr.
Steven