Re: Patch to allow Ada to work with tree-ssa

[Paolo Bonzini <bonzini@gnu.org>]

[Moved to gcc]

> When I first started working with computers, a high-end machine cost 52
> *years* of typical salaries.  Now we're talking about well under a week's
> salary to buy the fastest possible machine (perhaps as little as a day).

The first part is just statistics.  With the second, I cannot but disagree.

But if I had to upgrade my Pentium 4 1.7 GHz now (bought used for ~300 
Euros), I would probably spend no less than 1200 Euros, even if not 
buying a new mouse/keyboard/graphics board/hard drive.  (As to hard 
drives, I was lucky enough :-) to have a 20 GB one fail a month before 
its warranty expired; they gave me back a 60 GB disk, the smallest they 
had in store, and with two OSes installed I still have 50-odd free 
gigabytes).

I'm a volunteer, and it takes me a few months to *save* 1200 Euros, 
money that I'd like to save for other purposes (you know, holidays for 
example :-).  I think this holds for many other volunteers here who are 
Ph.D. students, and the youngest GCC developers probably still live on 
their parents' money.

Not to mention countries in the third world; I don't buy the argument of 
"you'd be surprised about the machines they have in the third world", 
especially because here we're interested in upgrade rates: though they 
may buy nice boxes *now*, I doubt they'll upgrade them for a while. My 
university has just dismissed some HP 715's, I'd rather not try 
bootstrapping GCC *there*.

Paolo