Re: [9fans] GUI toolkit for Plan 9

[Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu>]

I guess I just don't see the point in investing a lot of time and
effort into writing a really serious optimizer, Tom, if it's not really
needed.  I don't think that anyone is trying to use Plan 9 as a
seriously fast number crunching platform, after all.

Empirically, it's been shown that optimizers buy you roughly a factor
of two in terms of speed increase for most benchmarks (cf. Pugh's
comments on Probsting's law).  While I'm not going to throw away that
factor of two, I'm also not going to go so incredibly far out of my way
to as to invest man years of effort in creating an optimizer that will
give me just a few percent more in terms of performance, and certainly
I'm not going to go out of my wy to build a compiler that optimizes a
problem I'm not really all that concerned with (eg, floating point
intensive applications).

I'm not sure what your argument is, Tom; could you maybe post some data
to back up your claim that an operating system compiled with an
optimizing compiler (and, btw, the Plan 9 C compilers are optimizing
compilers, they just don't break their necks optimizing...) is more
than a few percent faster than one compiled with a non-optimizing
compiler?  Perhaps a literature search will give you a pointer to a
reference paper that backs up your claims?  Otherwise, it seems to me
that this is just speculation on your part.

	- Dan C.