From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 14:40:23 -0500 From: William Josephson To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] GUI toolkit for Plan 9 Message-ID: <20020226144023.A46570@honk.eecs.harvard.edu> References: <0203c3ac75cd0cbf6c419953cd7401cd@plan9.bell-labs.com> <87664kgoie.fsf@becket.becket.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <87664kgoie.fsf@becket.becket.net>; from tb+usenet@becket.net on Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 05:13:14PM +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 57497e72-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.