Re: GCC Status Report (2004-09-13)

[Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com>]

Jeffrey A Law wrote:

>On Mon, 2004-09-13 at 17:05, Mark Mitchell wrote:
>
>September 19
>
>
>* General compile-time performance improvements [Weinberg]
>
>Q. Presumably we can still also attack memory consumption
>   issues as well.    Right?
>
>The reason I ask is I have the first in what I expect will
>be a series of patches to start reducing memory consumption
>and bring more sense to our data structures.
>  
>
Yes.  We have a pretty good sense that reducing memory usage correlates 
with reducing compile time, and, of course, people do not infinite RAM 
anyhow, so this is a resource we should use prudently.  The biggest 
caveat is the one you have been raising recently: that touching pages 
merely for the purpose of marking memory as free is by no means always a 
win.  But, if you can make data structures smaller in the first place, 
and just allocate less along the way, that's going to help.

So, yes, this is OK -- but please do use your judgement about the 
prudence of attempting major overhauls.  The smaller the change (whether 
in terms of lines of code or in terms of conceptual complexity) the 
better, naturally.

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
(916) 791-8304
mark@codesourcery.com