There has been some discussion here of GCC's reputation and of how to
classify bugs.
This bug
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=26854
has gradually morphed from a compile-time issue to a space issue; if
it's not fixed for 4.4 (and it appears that it will not be fixed in
that time frame) then there will have been two consecutive major gcc
releases where I cannot use the compiler to build one of my
applications on the machines in my office and at home because they
each have "only" 8GB of RAM. The servers at work have 16 and 32GB of
ram, so I can still build and test it there.
Over the years I have tried to test prerelease versions of gcc with C
code that is generated by the Gambit Scheme compiler; that code seems
to be different enough from other tests that it has revealed some
bugs or inefficiencies in GCC, and people have been very helpful in
fixing those bugs and eliminating those inefficiencies. And GCC has
several features (computed gotos, ___builtin_expect, ...) that the
Gambit Scheme compiler now exploits to generate faster code, so
certainly the Gambit Scheme community appreciates GCC.
But now that 4.3.* and (soon) 4.4.* are pushed out to the general
public, I have to admit to the other people using Gambit that yes,
recent versions of GCC require markedly more resources to compile
code than older versions did. And, for some applications, the code
runs more slowly: because of
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=33928
basically all nontrivial operations on large (> 20,000 bits) bignums
are 10% slower when compiled with 4.3.* and 4.4 than with previous
compilers.
I really appreciate how helpful the GCC community has been over the
years and the product that community produces, but I can't see how
recent versions of GCC can avoid having a worsened reputation among
at least this small group of users.
Brad