Threading the compiler

[Sohail Somani]

On Fri, 2006-11-10 at 22:49 +0100, Marcin Dalecki wrote:
> > I don't think it can possibly hurt as long as people follow normal C++
> > coding rules.
> 
> Contrary to C there is no single general coding style for C++. In  
> fact for a project
> of such a scale this may be indeed the most significant deployment  
> problem for C++.

There isn't a single coding style, this is true. But there are styles
which are generally understood to be bad. 

> > Lots of threads communicating a lot would be bad.
> 
> This simply itsn't true. The compiler would be fine having many  
> threads handling a
> lot of data between them in a pipelined way. In fact it already does  
> just that,
> however without using the opportunity for paralell execution.

What I meant by that statement was that in general, when there is a lot
of synchronization, race conditions happen if discipline is not applied.
Correct multi threaded code is hard. I would submit that the last thing
you need are race conditions as a matter of course in a compiler because
someone forgot to lock resource A before B. Not saying anything about
the gcc developers in particular of course.

Aside: I think the RAII nature of C++ constructors/destructors is
helpful in locking code.

More 2c?

Sohail