> Being able to compile with gcc means that someone can > much more readily port to another architectures, such > as PPC > or strongarm or ...
Yes, understood, as written previously. That's what's possible thanks to GCC. The reality is, it did not yet happen. At the moment, we have exactly *zero* ports to any other architecture/platform. So that is a moot point at best, at least right now. What I'm saying is, it might have been cheaper, and it would definitely be more effective, to have ported the compilers to another platform rather than modified the OS source code to compile with another compiler. The advantage is increased binary performance in the future. Did you ever hear of the story of the Apple MacOS team making a presentation to Steve? The Mac booted too long, and Steve wanted them to cut the boot time by at least five seconds. The engineers looked at him and asked, "why? It's too expensive and too much work to optimize for *only* five seconds!" Steve told them to think of this: if every computer booted five seconds faster every time, multiplied by the number of computers Apple will have sold, how much time will be saved in total? Needless to say, they hacked and slashed at it, and after a lot of pain, MacOS was made to boot faster, if I recall correctly, by more than five seconds. My point is, the long term gains of having advanced compilers generate faster binaries on other platforms would have far outweighed the porting costs, by and large. (DISCLAIMER: I am not a Mac fan.) This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
