Re: [9fans] GUI toolkit for Plan 9

[William Josephson <jkw@eecs.harvard.edu>]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 05:13:14PM +0000, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> rob@plan9.bell-labs.com (rob pike) writes:
> 
> > Ten percent buys you, what, a couple of weeks of Moore's Law?  I'm not
> > against fast compilers - I'm actually rather impressed by good
> > compilers - but I do fret about optimizing compilers breaking my code.
> 
> Oh, of course, but that's a matter of writing correct code.
> 
> Your concern reminds me of people who are scared of garbage collection
> because they think it will have a bug and free live memory.  

No, if that were the case, I'd be forced to conclude that those who
write garbage collectors are significantly better hackers than the
people who write compilers, which I rather doubt.  Last year someone
across the hall spent a long time tracking down completely bogus code
produced by gcc on the mips target -- I think it turned out to be a
bug in loop unrolling, but I don't recall for sure.  I wish I still
had the thirty or forty line C program that gcc couldn't produce valid
alpha assembler for.  I have had problems with commercial compilers,
too, of course.  The fact of the matter is that I have had far more
trouble from optimizing compilers than from garbage collectors,
whether I've written them or someone else has.