[geeks] galeon Doesn't Suck that much....

[David Cantrell]

On Wed, Apr 17, 2002 at 11:48:09AM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [ On Wednesday, April 17, 2002 at 10:25:13 (+0100), David Cantrell wrote: ]
> > On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 12:39:20PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > You know as well as I do that vendors' claims and vendor support are not
> > worth much.  And whilst NetBSD may *run* on those platforms, that doesn't
> > mean that it is running optimally - and AFAIC, sub-optimal == bad.
> Ah ha!  I was wondering when someone might claim that....  :-)

OK, is sub-optimal good?  Most certainly not.  Is sub-optimal acceptable?
Sometimes, I'll admit, but I strive to do better than merely "acceptable".
And for most stuff that I do, sub-optimal is not really acceptable.  If
it's neither good nor acceptable, then it must be a Bad Thing.

> You know what Knuth says about optimisation......  (and if you don't
> you'd better go read up on it right quick now!  ;-)

Knuth has nothing against optimisation, at least not in anything I've read.
What he advises against is PREMATURE optimisation.  Improving the gcc code
generators for the various RISC architectures would not be premature
optimisation.  The application is mature.

> >  But then, as I said earlier, you don't choose NetBSD for performance.
> 
> I have avoided NetBSD in some situations because of performance issues
> that it exhibited even when running vendor-compiled binaries.

Presumably those vendor-compiled binaries would still be using gcc-compiled
libraries, and would be making system calls to the gcc-compiled kernel.

> > You seem to think "bad code" == "bad source code".  When I used the phrase,
> > I meant "bad (ie sub-optimal) object code".
> I most certainly understood what you meant -- you just didn't understand
> what I wrote in reply!  ;-)

We will have to agree to disagree, cos I can't be arsed to root around and
find exactly what you said and the rest of my reply to it.

-- 
Lord Protector David Cantrell     |     http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

  For every vengeance, there is an equal and opposite revengeance.
                                            -- Cartoon Law X