[wplug] Compiler questions

[Brandon Kuczenski]

On Thu, 3 Feb 2005, Burt E Reany wrote:

>   There IS such an optimised compiler - but it's the proprietary compiler
> provided by a manufacturer for their hardware family. Proprietary and
> process control equipment that need such intense thruput, either due to
> load factors or marketing requirements, are therefore both restrictive and
> expensive. Open source systems don't pretend to wring such intensive use
> out of every hardware platform, but provide consistancy across hardware
> boundaries, and support migration between hardware families.
>   In addition, the unavailability of source code for proprietary systems
> posts a disadvantage to the application developers in that environment that
> open source developers don't suffer from.
>

/remembers discovering, isolating, and reporting bugs in Analog Devices' 
proprietary C compiler for their SHARC embedded processor.  Most of those 
bugs went away when we turned off optimization... but then, what's the 
point?

//in fact, I think we found a bug in the silicon, too..

-Brandon