On 2/21/07, Mark Mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
To be honest, my instinct for the FSF is to take the 4% hit and get rid of this nasty class of bugs. Users measure compiler quality by more than just floating-point benchmarks; FP code is a relatively small (albeit important, and substantial) set of all code. That's why I asked Danny for the patches in the first place.
Of course the speed of a compiler is measured on testcases where speed matters - and this is usually FP code. Now based on this reasoning we could (as CodeSourcery probably did) enable -fno-strict-aliasing by default, which fixes the class of 4.1.x bugs we are talking about. With leaving the possibility for the user to specify -fstrict-aliasing and get back the speed for FP code with the risk of getting wrong-code. Now, the realistic choices for 4.2.0 as I see them are, in order of my personal preference: 1) Ship 4.2.0 as is 2) Ship 4.2.0 with the aliasing fixes reverted 3) no more reasonable option. Maybe don't ship 4.2.0 at all. so, I don't see backporting more patches or even re-branching as a real option. Richard.
