On Mon, 2005-05-16 at 17:03, Daniel Berlin wrote: > > if only it were that simple[1]. However, even if the money does get > > spent it's unlikely to help because there are too many developers that > > just DON'T CARE about (or worse, seem to be openly hostile to) making > > the compiler more efficient. > > They don't care because nobody pays them to care (IE you've got it > backwards), and they have other higher priority spare time projects that > they like to work on. >
It shouldn't be necessary to pay every developer to care. We need to buy into the fact that if some of the developer community cares enough to pay for the work to be done, then doing things that undo that work are going to be unpopular. That is, we should treat increases in memory usage/slow-downs in the compiler as regressions in the same way as we treat worse code as regressions. That's the only way we'll ever get serious about this. Unless and until we can accept this then nobody is going to put money into it, because it'll just be wasted money. > If you want to change the priorities of paid developers, you will have > to do so by affecting the work they are paid to do, not by trying to > convince them that speeding up the compiler is better than whatever > hobby projects they enjoy working on. This is because speeding up the > compiler is almost never an enjoyable hobby project :). I'm fully aware of this fact. It doesn't change things though. If we are serious about engineering a good compiler, then we need to be just as serious about these issues. R.
