Chris,
> >> I found this. Any comments? Is GNU this bad?
>
> Ya know, it is really getting funny how hard these guys with
> the proprietary compilers are trying to convince people that
> their $XXXX price tags are worth it. The market is falling
> out from under them and they know it. It appears they are
> staking their whole sales pitch on the idea of better
> optimized code than GNU.
The demise of proprietary compiler vendors has long been prophesized,
but doesn't happen. There are always users for whom GNU products are
not a good fit for one reason or another. Just like in any other walk
of life, you choose a particular path to fit your needs and free or open
source software is not a good fit for all users.
> Well I have two things to say about that:
>
> (1) I used several of these proprietary compilers, and I ran
> into serious bugs. It matters little how good some
> optimization is when the damn compiler has serious bugs. Who
> cares about optimization. I need a compiler that works - period.
Every compiler has problems, period. Every compiler can be improved, it
follows from the halting problem, and is the unpinning of the Permanent
Employment Lemma for compiler engineers. Formally validating a compiler
for correctness is well beyond the resources of many companies (and even
defeats the UK's MOD), especially for a language like C, and C++ is an
order of magnitude more complex. There are, however, formally validated
compilers for subsets of strictly-typed languages but these are not
usually the type of language and compiler many users would freely
choose.
The GNU compiler for ARM has bugs, just like every other compiler, it's
a fact of life which follows from the inherent complexity of building a
compiler from a natural language specification.
--
Paul Curtis, Rowley Associates Ltd http://www.rowley.co.uk
CrossWorks for MSP430, ARM, and now AVR processors