On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Robert Dewar <de...@adacore.com> wrote: > Actually for my taste, you have to get a MUCH bigger factor in compile > time before you can call yourself a fast compiler (Realia COBOL by > comparison compiles millions of lines a minute of code on current > PC's, using just one core).
Heh, you always bring up the Realia compiler when there's a compile time discussion. Must have been a really impressive piece of work, that it was so fast :-) > GCC has taken a decision to favor > performance of the code absolutely over compiler performance. > That's not such a bad bet given how fast machines are getting. > So I think this compile time advantage is not that interesting. I disagree (how unexpected is that? :-). I think you are right that it is not per se a bad decision to favor performance of the code over performance of the compiler itself. But a quick investigation of, say, compile times for a linux kernel from GCC 3.1 to GCC 4.5 shows that GCC slows down faster than what Moore's law compensates for. And people do complain about this. I'll admit it is hard to say if the complainers are a significant number of GCC users or just a loud minority... Ciao! Steven
