From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200202261745.MAA03846@math.psu.edu> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] GUI toolkit for Plan 9 In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 26 Feb 2002 17:13:14 GMT." <87664kgoie.fsf@becket.becket.net> From: Dan Cross Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 12:44:59 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 567491a8-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.