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Date:      Tue, 8 May 2001 22:02:31 +1200
From:      "Juha Saarinen" <juha@saarinen.org>
To:        "Jordan Hubbard" <jkh@osd.bsdi.com>
Cc:        <dmmiller@cvzoom.net>, <msmith@FreeBSD.ORG>, <kris@obsecurity.org>, <nuno.mailinglists@pt-quorum.com>, <guilherme@nortenet.pt>, <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   RE: CFLAGS Optimization
Message-ID:  <KPECIILENDDLPCNIMLOFCENOCDAA.juha@saarinen.org>
In-Reply-To: <20010508012916Q.jkh@osd.bsdi.com>

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:: You seem to be arguing from an odd perspective.

Well, the perspective, if there is any apart from general curiosity, is
obscured by the lack of documentation.

GCC has all these optimisations options, and you might be tempted to use
them because obviously, you want to tune your set-up so it works errr...
optimally. That can't be surprising to you or anyone else.

:: We know all of those things already, so what's the real
:: question?  Is the question "why aren't they fixed?"  The easy and
:: obvious answer to that is because nobody has fixed them and you should
:: certainly feel free to dive on in since they obviously won't fix
:: themselves and have been around for awhile.  Is the question "should
:: they be fixed?"  Certainly, but see the previous Q&A.

Yes, but you must agree that this is a poorly documented area. If you look
at the GCC documentation, it says that "optflag -x produces better code for
processor/architecture Y". It's not so easy for people to work out which
bits of the GCC documentation are bogus and which are not.

If GCC optimisations are unequivocally bad, ie. not useful in any sense of
the word, it might be an idea to patch the FreeBSD GCC so that it's not
possible to use any optflags.

:: The next place this subject usually goes is "why don't we use
:: something other than gcc?"  Any and all actual attempts to do so is
:: left as an exercise for the reader.  Like riding a unicycle, it's not
:: as easy as it looks.

Well, I never found riding a unicycle that hard, but I guess it's an
individual experience and all that. ;-)

It wouldn't hurt, I don't think, to have an alternative to GCC.

-- Juha


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