On 06/03/2010 12:51 PM, Robert Dewar wrote:

Steven Bosscher wrote:

Indeed. It is, well, perhaps not surprising, but quite annoying (to me
at least) that a possible move to C++ as implementation language of
GCC is so much bigger news than all the amazing amounts of work done
in the last few years on things like LTO, the vectorizer, IRA, etc...

And indeed you have to worry a bit that productive work on critical
areas like this may be siphoned off developing, reviewing and testing
changes from C to C++ whose benefit may often be much less than the
work involved in doing them.

I know someone who works at a National Lab in the US (that will not be named) who had his management decide to rewrite a rather crucial (to that Lab's core business) 6+ million line Fortran system into C++.

He told me that 11 years ago. When I met him again in February, I related to him that I referred to that project as "the one with its return on investment date firmly in the 22nd century" to *my* management.

He replied that his management currently doesn't believe it will have a return on investment at all - they've written it off as a valuable "learning experience".

--
Toon Moene - e-mail: t...@moene.org - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
At home: http://moene.org/~toon/; weather: http://moene.org/~hirlam/
Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html#Fortran

Reply via email to