From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 25567 invoked by alias); 20 Jan 2004 10:04:03 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: Sender: gcc-owner@gcc.gnu.org Received: (qmail 25538 invoked from network); 20 Jan 2004 10:03:59 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mallaury.noc.nerim.net) (62.4.17.102) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 20 Jan 2004 10:03:59 -0000 Received: from tetto.gentiane.org (espie.gentiane.org [62.212.102.210]) by mallaury.noc.nerim.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 81E0462D47 for ; Tue, 20 Jan 2004 11:03:56 +0100 (CET) Received: from tetto.gentiane.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by tetto.gentiane.org (8.12.9/8.12.1) with ESMTP id i0KA3jlM017680 for ; Tue, 20 Jan 2004 11:03:46 +0100 (CET) Received: (from espie@localhost) by tetto.gentiane.org (8.12.9/8.12.1/Submit) id i0KA3hCE005581 for gcc@gcc.gnu.org; Tue, 20 Jan 2004 11:03:43 +0100 (CET) Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 10:04:00 -0000 From: Marc Espie To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org Subject: A quick summary of gcc compilation speed from a political point of view Message-ID: <20040120100340.GA2214@tetto.gentiane.org> Reply-To: espie@nerim.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i X-SW-Source: 2004-01/txt/msg01465.txt.bz2 >From the little discussion that I inadvertently started, I believe I can start to draw conclusions. There is a large number of people who apparently do not care at all that gcc is getting slower, because they say that we can buy faster hardware, and gcc is not getting slower THAT fast. If that's the consensus, it would be a good idea to seriously amend the GCC description. Because I don't think GCC fits its former description. If that's true, and speed doesn't count that much, then GCC has become a compiler that can should only be hosted on ix86 systems. All over systems are either becoming too expensive or too slow for almost anyone... Frankly, I don't really see myself getting a distcc farm of sparc64 machines in the future... So, the target audience of GCC consists of: - people who want native ix86 compilers that create good code; - people who want a cross-compiler for another system that's hosted on an ix86. Other combinations don't look reasonable to me. In any case, when I pointed out other combinations that looked useful and that would be nice to have, I completely got shooted down by various people, stating cost issues, or the excellence of GCC as a cross-compiler. [ From personal experience, I can tell you that cross-compiling an entire distribution is hard, and yields a whole other set of bugs to fix. I can also tell you that native compiling the same distribution on a little used system will invariably expose bugs that are not visible in a cross-compiling setting. ] But that's not the point. The point is that, right now, GCC is each day becoming more unusable as a compiler on any host that isn't ix86. -- Marc