From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 22827 invoked by alias); 19 Jan 2004 20:38:21 -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 22792 invoked from network); 19 Jan 2004 20:38:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO nile.gnat.com) (205.232.38.5) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 19 Jan 2004 20:38:20 -0000 Received: from gnat.com (ppp1.gnat.com [205.232.38.211]) by nile.gnat.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 253F0F2DC1; Mon, 19 Jan 2004 15:38:10 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <400C402F.9010400@gnat.com> Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 20:38:00 -0000 From: Robert Dewar User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Eric Botcazou Cc: Scott Robert Ladd , Gabriel Dos Reis , Nick Burrett , Marc Espie , geoffk@apple.com, gcc@gcc.gnu.org Subject: Re: gcc 3.5 integration branch proposal References: <90200277-4301-11D8-BDBD-000A95B1F520@apple.com> <400C1D07.9020300@coyotegulch.com> <400C2789.4070908@gnat.com> <200401192120.53057.ebotcazou@libertysurf.fr> In-Reply-To: <200401192120.53057.ebotcazou@libertysurf.fr> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2004-01/txt/msg01373.txt.bz2 Eric Botcazou wrote: >>That's a pretty reasonable machine at a very reasonable price. > For a professional developer based in the US, certainly. I'm not sure GCC > should primarily target such a population though. My goodness, I would not even *consider* asking a professional developer (someone whose time is worth in the region of $1000 a day to a typical company) to use this low end machine. So we sure have totally different perspectives. The point is that you have to decide on some reasonable benchmark. To use as the benchmark a machine bought three years ago for far more than $400 does not seem realistic to me. A home machine that costs $400 seems to me to be a reasonable definition of reasonable hardware. Note that we are not saying that gcc won't work at all on slower smaller machines, just that we expect relatively poor performance on such machines. If your valuation of your time is that you would rather put up with this poor performance than spend the $400 that's certainly of course quite reasonable. At some point you have to make a clear decision of whether you think of gcc as a hobbyists tool for people who cannot afford any kind of reasonable hardware (remember that these days text books cost $100) or whether it is a serious development tool usable by professionals. Note that I did not say *only* by professionals, but to distort the project to say that all code must compile efficiently on machines that are three years old seems a mistake to me. Furthermore I think it will be counterproductive in improving peformance, since it is an unrealistic requirement. The idea here is to set a floor for machine performance for which we consider that the compiler should have good performance. As I said in my earlier note, the idea is that, at least till we update the baseline, we do not say to people, get a faster/bigger machine. Instead we consider it something that needs fixing. You might like gcc to give good performance with a three year old machine (that translates to approximately a 400MHz Pentium 3 with 32-64 megs of memory), but realistically I don't think this is going to happen. Note by the way that the pricing here was for a premium machine brand new from a premium vendor. If you want to rummage around the second hand market, or build yourself, you can obviously undercut this price (which annoyingly for example includes the cost of Windows XP)