From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
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: Quinn Dunkan <quinn@bolivar.ugcs.caltech.edu>
Message-Id: <20020226174844.9D73634086@bolivar.ugcs.caltech.edu>
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 09:48:39 -0800
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 568bbefa-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025


> 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.  

I've always used gc-ed languages, and I've never had any problems due to buggy
gc (except some surprising performance differences between cmucl on x86 and
cmucl on everything else, since they use different gcs).  Once they get the gc
right they tend to leave it alone.

On the other hand, though I hardly use C much (though I compile a lot of it), I
have had weird behaviour under -O2, which went away when I removed it.  The gcc
people are always messing with the optimizer.  That personal experience
combined with reading docs that say things like "the loop unroller is buggy, so
be careful when you use -O3" (and what's the deal with all this -O6 stuff?  I
thought -O3 was the "possible overkill, may slow down code more than speed it
up" setting) has made me paranoid and now when the compiler segfaults or the
program segfaults (often C generated by a compiler for another language, which
is probably particularly strangely written), the first thing I do is remove -O.
And it sometimes fixes the problem.  For example, the sather compiler will
segfault if compiled with -O.