Richard Kenner wrote:
Vladimir Makarov writes:
Vlad> Especially I did not like David Edelhson's phrase "and no new
Vlad> private dataflow schemes will be allowed in gcc passes". It was not
Vlad> such his first expression. Such phrases are killing competition which
Vlad> is bad for gcc. What if the new specialized scheme is faster. What
Vlad> if somebody decides to write another better df infrastructure from the
Vlad> scratch to solve the coming df infrastructure problems.
First, "another better df infrastructure" is not a private
explained on the IRC chat, the new df is general infrastructure. If you
can speed it up more, that's great. If you need another dataflow problem
solved, add it to the infrastructure. GCC is not served well by five (5)
different dataflow solvers, each with its own quirks, bugs, duplicative
memory and duplicative maintenance.
I agree. "Competition" and making things "better" is not always the right
approach for a project the size of GCC: in fact, it's more often *not*
the right approach. In a project like GCC, stability is more important.
Once something is written, it's obsolete. But changing something in the
infrastructure (or duplicating it) affects stability and the gain is
rarely worth it.
In general, I am agree with this. I am just opposing to the strong
words "not allowed". I think it should be decided in each concrete case.
