From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
From: "Thomas Bushnell, BSG" <tb+usenet@becket.net>
Message-ID: <87n0xtfoqp.fsf@becket.becket.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
References: <20020228171926.885C2199EC@mail.cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] GUI toolkit for Plan 9
Date: Fri,  1 Mar 2002 10:03:17 +0000
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5d342148-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

anothy@cosym.net writes:

> but i think what lucio, and probably most of the people on the
> 8c side of the recent 8c/gcc discussion, meant is more like:
> 	adding code to a program increases its probability of
> 	being incorrect, THEREFOR you should be sure any gains
> 	won by this code are greater than this risk.
> i don't think anyone here would seriously argue that the
> cost/gain decisions should never be made, but rather that the
> way the decisions were/are made in gcc is incorrect.

Thank you for spelling it out; perhaps I did miss something in the
original statement.

However, one way to decrease the risk is simply to spend more effort
in care and fixing bugs.  Merely adding a new component need not
increase risk; it simply means that if you want to bring the risk down
to where it was before, you have to expend more effort.

Now, the GCC maintainers are willing to spend that effort.  Even if
that's a silly decision and they should be spending their time on
other things, they do spend the effort.

The real irony here is that of all the pseudo-examples tossed around,
there has been only one mention thus far of a compiler designer
introducing a willful bug for the sake of optimization, and that's in
8c.

Thomas