From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu>
Message-Id: <200111110334.WAA06281@augusta.math.psu.edu>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Rant (was Re: Plan9 and Ada95?)
In-Reply-To: <200111110138.BAA02696@localhost.localdomain>
References: <aam396@mail.usask.ca>
Cc:
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 22:34:02 -0500
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 1e27b3de-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

In article <200111110138.BAA02696@localhost.localdomain> you write:
>But then, this ranking comes from a commercial compiler market, where
>the customer doesn't see anything but the finished product. If you're
>in an environment where you have cause to recompile the entire OS and
>surrounding applications four times a day, I can see how (5) might work
>its way up the list.

...Or if you have to work on a large C++ project where the compilation
process, running on a quad processor Sun Ultra Enterprise 450 with 4GB
of RAM, takes 45 minutes.  And the boneheads working on the project
have screwed up the build structure so totally that to compile an
incremental change requires building the entire source, then compile
time becomes very significant.

I should note here that we tried switching to gcc, but because the
stupid C++ ABI is so vastly different from compiler to compiler, it
didn't work with our ODBC libraries.

Testing on that project was a massive pain.  One would have thought
that that would have made the software have some slightly higher
quality, but oddly enough it didn't.

The really funny thing was that the solution would have been to ditch
C++ in favor of a `scripting' language like python, but management
nixed that idea.  Oh well....

	- Dan C.