[rescue] Re: Being jobless

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 12:30:31PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> > So... why didn't you use GCC?
> 
> Because:
>   1) GCC generates pathetically pessimized code on RISC systems.
>   2) GCC object code will not properly exchange data with the rest of my
>      MIPSpro-generated object code on an IRIX system because a member of
>      the GCC team got register-pddking backwards.  They admit this is a
>      bug (and have since the 2.8 days), but refuse to fix it.
>   3) MIPSpro does a much better job of producing 64-bit optimized
>      objects and optimizing for a particular instruction set (MIPS-IV in
>      this case) than GCC does.
> 
> In short: because I like my high-performing computers to continue to
> exhibit high-performance.  If I'm going to drop $$$ on a vendor's
> compiler that has actually passed an ANSI C certification suite, I'm
> going to want to use that rather than GCC, which has only occasionally
> been metioned in the same sentence as "ANSI C" and usually has a
> negative in-between.
> 
> I chuckle at every README I've seen that says "REQUIRES a strictly ANSI
> C-compliant compiler (I recommend GCC)".  It's like saying "REQUIRES an
> extremely stable operating environment (I recommend Windows 98)".  More
> often than not, code bearing such a notice won't even -compile- with
> something like SunONE or MIPSpro due to all sorts of GCCisms.

On a side note, on the SH-3 we can't even use -O2 optimization and have
the ecos example programs still function.