Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2000 10:10:09 +1100 From: Peter Jeremy <peter.jeremy@alcatel.com.au> To: Thomas David Rivers <rivers@dignus.com> Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: lint Message-ID: <20001206101008.C95349@gsmx07.alcatel.com.au> In-Reply-To: <200012051217.HAA56851@lakes.dignus.com>; from rivers@dignus.com on Tue, Dec 05, 2000 at 07:17:12AM -0500 References: <20001205111025.I22946@moose.bri.hp.com> <200012051217.HAA56851@lakes.dignus.com>
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On 2000-Dec-05 07:17:12 -0500, Thomas David Rivers <rivers@dignus.com> wrote: > Having been "in the compiler business" for almost 17 years; let me > see if I can be an "expert witness" here. And I can think of 3 other people who inhabit these lists who have a reasonable degree of compiler expertise. > Fortunately, C is a language that one person can get their hands > around - it takes a little over a man year before the first compiler > (with bugs) sees the light of day. Though I believe C9X is trying to rectify this 'problem', by re-designing the language to remove the option of a `simple' compiler :-(. > Then, you'll want to add an optimizer. This is critical for RISC architectures, and becoming more important with heavily-pipelined, super-scalar CISC. The IA64 architecture in particular places quite heavy demands on the compiler. > Oh - and don't forget - the FreeBSD kernel makes heavy use > of gcc extensions; we'll need those. Apart from the use of the 'Extended asm', AFAIK all of the extensions purely relate to __attribute__ hints and could be readily disabled in <sys/cdefs.h>. > As to original AT&T compilers; I recently discovered that Plan9 is > now "open source" (I haven't looked at the license myself) so it may > provide compile sources I would expect it to be self-contained (ie include the compiler), but I haven't checked. I do recall from an early talk on it by Rob Pike that a fair amount of effort went into speeding up the C compiler (though I don't know about the code quality). (I'm also a bit uncertain of the degree of open-ness of the license). > My ultimate point is; we should be thrilled to have gcc - it's > a remarkable achievement considering that it is open-sourced (and > many of the contributors are not paid.) I totally agree. Peter To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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