On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Jack Howarth <howa...@bromo.med.uc.edu> wrote: > Steven, > One other comment. I've felt for awhile that a major > strength of FSF gcc was the fact that its support for > so many targets insured that latent bugs tended to be > found in the compiler. Likewise graphite has recently > exposed certain latent bugs as well. Why should we not > expect the same to be true for the front-end if an > alternative middle/end is used via dragon-egg? It may > well tickle unique flaws in the front-end.
Jack, The Graphite project and the various GCC targets participate in GCC development. Helping fix GCC bugs affecting those features, supports and grows the GCC developer base. There needs to be some mutualistic relationship. I don't see members of the LLVM community arguing that they should contribute to GCC to improve performance comparisons. As Steven mentioned, LLVM has been extremely effective at utilizing FSF technology while its community complains about the FSF, GCC, GCC's leadership and GCC's developer community. If GCC is so helpful and useful and effective, then work on it as well and give it credit; if GCC is so bad, then why rely on it? The rhetoric is disconnected from the actions. David
