On the use of abort() in the testsuite

[IainS]

I feel in my bones that this will probably have been discussed  
before ... but.

On my platform of choice when abort() is called it tries to

a) generate a coredump
b) formats and saves a cute crashdump to allow non-expert users to  
forward failure info to application writers or the system vendor.

This is quite consuming of system resources when running the gcc  
testsuite which is full of abort() calls.

I queried darwin-dev about switching off (b)
  [although one is normally reluctant to do so - because it's actually  
pretty useful]
however, this is non-trivial and not an option on a a day-today basis.

Also the response to (a) was that doing a coredump is a POSIX- 
compliant response to abort().

(I obviously set ulimit to 0 for cores to work around this).

----

So... I wonder what does abort() offer to the testsuite?

  that, for example,   _exit(-(__LINE__)) ;

doesn't?

These days, running the testsuite way outweighs (> 2:1)  building the  
compiler - so any possible ways to improve turn-round time on regtests  
would be cool.

(of course, it's a lot of editing to do just to find out.. )

Iain