On 3/19/07, Nicholas Nethercote <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
As an interested outsider: GCC's compile-time speed has been gradually decreasing for a while now. It seems to be acknowledged as an undesirable thing, but not much has happened to change it. AIUI, this is largely because it's very difficult. Nonetheless, seeing a 5% slow-down caused by fixing a data structure design bogon is disappointing.
GCC has also been getting improved functionality, better optimizations, and better language support. Some of these improvements are going to cost us at compile time, because better optimizations can require more time, and today's languages require more work to compile and optimize than yesterday's. No, I don't want my compiler to be 5% slower, but I'll give up 5% for better standards conformance and improved code generation. It's not all bad news, either. Canonical types got us 3-5% speedup in the C++ front end (more on template-heavy code), so I figure I have at least a 3% speedup credit I can apply against the 9-bit code patch. That brings this patch under 2% net slow-down, so we should just put it in now :) Cheers, Doug
