Thank you all for your ideas, they are much appreciated. I will certainly
investigate into the areas you mentioned, so do keep the feedback coming.
I will certainly comment on them, once I have a better understanding. And
I'd like to get in sync with existing work, so that duplicate effort is
avoided (for example I'm already researching on finding an alternative
hash function to replace htab_hash_string(), I don't know if Nicola has
done that).
But for now I will be reading some tutorial slides I found from HiPEAC and
CGO conferences, so that I understand GCC's architecture. Slides are good
but are missing many things, so if you have video/audio transcripts of
tutorials they would come in handy.
It is also a priority to standardise the way of measuring gcc's speed
(which files to compile with what options), and dedicate some old
machinery to that purpose. Perhaps this has already been done, and I can
use existing setups? I found the following very useful pages:
http://gcc.opensuse.org/
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/PerformanceTesting
On another note, I can see that a similar project was accepted for 2007
GSOC, titled as "Speeding up GCC for fun and profit". Where can I find
more info?
Finally I'd appreciate any guidelines regarding submitting patches for
review or development in general. For example is "diff -u" the proper
format to use, or should I include Changelog diff in all patches, or
should they all be sent to gcc-patches list even if the patch is initial
version just for reviewing, etc.
Thanks,
Dimitris
