On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 12:58:39AM -0700, Ollie Wild wrote: > >Related to this: have you guys ever considered to making the -On > >flags dependent on the architecture? > > It came up in a few side conversations. As I understand it, RMS has > decreed that the -On optimizations shall be architecture independent.
But decrees of this kind from RMS (on purely technical matters) are negotiable. On matters of free software principle, RMS is the law. On technical matters he's (IMHO) just one hacker, though as the original author of gcc he should get respect and a certain amount of deference. If champions of this idea can make the case that the benefits outweigh the costs by a significant factor, it could be considered. But there are considerable costs: paths that get lots of testing are solid; paths that get less testing aren't. If every port uses a different set of optimizations we will see more "target-specific" bugs that really aren't.
