chris jefferson wrote: > One thing I have come across, both in gcc and in other projects, is that > often discussion is not the best option, but instead just writing some > code is better.
There's a fine line between too much talk and not enough. > It's very easy to have discussions go around in circles about if option > a or option b is better, and which will lead to slowdowns, or intrusive > changes, or whatever. I'm more interested in "Does doing A make any sense?" An example: In its formative stages, gfortran had a problem with certain kinds of constants. Whether the problem needed to be solved depending on how strictly one read the standard. I simply went ahead and wrote a patch (actually, three of them), trying to satisfy all sides involved. This resulted in long discussions of whether the problem really *was* a problem or not. In the end, the compiler was modified to behave as other Fortran 95s do (which was my original suggestion, before people started quoting the standard), and I wasted much of the time spent writing the original patch. Had the problem been talked out in the beginning, I could have spent more time working on an acceptable solution. This is one incident that lead me to stop submitting patches; I have only so much time for GCC, and am donating all of it out of my own pocket. Maybe others can afford to do that, but I can't, after three months in the hospital followed by an injury to my wife. If I'm going to contribute to GCC, it needs to be something I know will be more than just a shot in the dark. > While it's briefly annoying to write code which then isn't used > the first time you do it, I've quickly learned it's faster and easier > than extensive discussions, and most good code will go through 3 or 4 > iterations before it finally settles, and need a whole bundle of tests > writing, so writing an initial test version is not actually that big a > time investment compared to the total amount of time something will > take. Working code is also of course by far the most convincing argument > :). Perhaps I'm too steeped in being an engineer, but in my experience, quality upfront discussion saves a lot of time and produces better results. I'd hate to build a bridge the way you suggest developing GCC. ..Scott