Ben Elliston wrote:
On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 10:48 +0100, Manuel López-Ibáñez wrote:
GCC is thoroughly tested. None the less, there is always room for
improvement, so if you have time to implement your ideas or write
documentation, you are welcome to contribute.
If you build the compiler with coverage instrumentation and run the
testsuite, you might get a shock. It's not as well tested as you might
think.
If it gave anyone a shock to find out that the test suite did not
provide 100% coverage, then that person is not very familiar with
compiler technology. It is by no means SOP to try to get 100%
coverage testing of a compiler, and in practice for many reasons,
very difficult (compilers often contain a lot of deactivated code
that comes from defensive programming against errors, since
compilers more than many programs routinely expect to be fed
rubbish, and work hard to behave nicely when mistreated in
this way :-)
Ben
