From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Thomas Bushnell, BSG" Message-ID: <87664jxrsw.fsf@becket.becket.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii References: <181b9e858518e43368953c1050365780@plan9.bell-labs.com>, <3C7C829F.D7A24A28@san.rr.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] GUI toolkit for Plan 9 Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 10:20:36 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 57fe9eba-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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