Re: gcc 3.5 integration branch proposal

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva@redhat.com>]

On Jan 19, 2004, Geoff Keating <geoffk@apple.com> wrote:

> On Jan 19, 2004, at 2:04 PM, Eric Botcazou wrote:
>>> I would look at it this way: Why should a professional developer based
>>> in the US try to make GCC work on anything less than this machine?
>>> It's clearly not cost-effective to spend any significant time doing
>>> so.
>> 
>> My point of view is exactly reverse :-)  Why should a developer not
>> keep GCC
>> working on such a machine?

> Because it's a waste of the developer's time?

Err...  And under what kind of logic is getting the compiler slower
not a waste of time for every GCC developer (that has to bootstrap and
test the whole thing for every patch) and user (that runs GCC to build
their own applications).

Sure, one can get beefier hardware.  But there's a limit to that, and
making the compiler slower just because it still bootstraps in under 2
hours on a reasonable machine for US standards can make a project that
used to build overnight to no longer complete the build when people
get back to work on the next day.  Sure, you can then start throwing
other tricks into the problem, like ccache and distcc in compiler
farms, but this means additional costs.  So we're actually imposing a
tax on everybody who wants to use the newer compiler by not caring
about its performance.

I know Apple has put a lot of effort on speeding up the compiler, and
I can only find it sad that such efforts are fundamentally
incompatible with the relatively-scalable approach to speeding builds
up, namely, the use of compiler farms with distcc, Mosix or similar
techniques.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Happy GNU Year!                     oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer