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
