"Experimental" features in releases

[Paolo Bonzini]

> We use to call this "benchmarketing"
> 
> I don't see why GNU would want to do that for anything.

Because (that's unfortunate, agreed) GCC does need some marketing. 
Unfortunately people compare GCC with icc (or other compilers) using 
SPEC, and you want them to compare apples to apples -- compilers that 
have SPEC-hacks with compilers that have SPEC-hacks.  Otherwise, GCC 
will always look poor. :-(

Also, in some cases, SPEC hacks actually make some sense.  For example, 
people have learnt to use arrays-of-pointers-to-arrays in order to cope 
with the x86 real mode segmented architecture, and still do so.  But it 
is much better instead to use huge bidimensional arrays nowadays, and 
one SPEC hack converts one form to the other.

Paolo