Messages in this thread | | | From | (Anton Ertl) | Subject | Re: [rfc] built-in native compiler for Linux? | Date | Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:22:24 GMT |
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Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> writes: > Furthermore, a lot of optimizations in GCC are driven by >SPECint and SPECfp benchmarketing, with little practical relevance >to 99% of the apps, including the kernel.
Right, and it's not just the kernel that has to work around GCC breakage, it's also many apps (possibly all of them except SPEC benchmarks, and the few 100% C99-compliant programs (probably none with more than than 500 lines of code)).
So I guess a decent alternative to GCC would attract not just the kernel people, but also many (most?) applications people. Then GCC would no longer be misused for ordinary applications or kernels and it could focus on its true destiny: compiling SPEC benchmarks.
Whether to build such a compiler mostly from scratch as you suggest or as a fork of GCC is up to whoever does it. The GCC fork variant has the advantage of having a lot of targets available already, but the disadvantage of a large and complex code base.
- anton -- M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
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