GCC priorities [Was Re: We're out of tree codes; now what?]

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Thu, 21 Mar 2007, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

> I think you may misunderstand the mission statement.  The mission
> statement is not a technical roadmap.  It's a statement of general
> goals.  If the community has a serious disagreement, the mission
> statement can sometimes help clarify matters.
> [...]
> The problem as I see it is that different gcc developers have
> different goals.  And it is a natural tendency for developers to care
> more about their specific goals than any developer cares about the
> general goals.  The effect is that specific goals get implemented at
> the expense of general goals.

Exactly.  I'm viewing the mission statement as the moral equivalent of a 
constitution -- the highest guidelines that you fall back on when everything 
else fails.  Your first paragraph above indicates that you view it 
similarly.  But it's currently so vague that I don't imagine it's much 
use... it's like a legal constitution that says "be nice to everybody".

Many (most?) open source projects have one or a few benevolent dictators 
that control things.  GCC doesn't (the steering committee is too far removed 
from day-to-day decisions), and I think its development suffers for it at 
times.  Maybe I'm wrong, but to return to the original topic, I don't expect 
to see compile-time performance improve significantly in any future release.

Nick