Re: [9fans] GUI toolkit for Plan 9

["Thomas Bushnell, BSG" <tb+usenet@becket.net>]

edorman@san.rr.com (Eric Dorman) writes:

> IMHO the real deal is whether it's fast enough to do what you want
> it to do.  No doubt 8c would benefit if it had the same zillions 
> of both paid and unpaid hours gcc has, but that's not saying 
> anything earth-shattering; for this particular app it does reasonably
> well, IMO, given the level of effort put into it.  If somebody 
> wants 8c to go faster then they are welcome to turn the crank 
> to make it happen....

Sure, GCC has available way more person-hours to try and get every
last bit of improvement out of the generated code, and 8c just doesn't
have that much time available.  I think Dan Cross is entirely right in
suggesting that such speed improvements might not be worth the effort
it would take to put them into 8c.

But that's only an argument against adding gobs of hairy optimization
to 8c; it's not an argument for why GCC is somehow *bad* for having
such optimizations.  Indeed, it's really an argument for why dropping
8c is the best thing to do!  But then, 8c does really have a great
advantage in speed-of-compilation.  So both compilers are doing useful
things.

Incidentally, the reason GCC has gobs of people working on it is
pretty darn simple.  It's because GCC has a license which encourages
gobs of people to work on it.

Thomas