On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 1:12 AM, Joel Sherrill <joel.sherr...@oarcorp.com> wrote: > Another thing that has bothered me is the fear of > getting slower. If using C++ makes GCC slower, then > GCC C++ needs to get faster. This is eating our own > dog food. :)
Indeed. If we can avoid the obvious problems (vtables, etc.) there is no reason why using C++ should lead to a slower compiler. If we can properly hide some things better, maybe we can even help our own optimizers. With some of the union tricks GCC plays now, GCC has to make the worst-case assumptions when building itself. If we can solve this with C++ we may actually get a faster compiler! (fingers crossed...) Things like bootstrapping with LTO (in whopr more, hopefully the default for GCC 4.6?) may also help reduce the potential extra overhead of using C++. Ciao! Steven