Re: question about linker

On 13/12/2024 15:20, Waldek Hebisch wrote:

Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> wrote:

>
What I did care about was; about whom Waldek spoke when formulating
"explicit endorsement from gawk developer" - I asked "Who was that?"
>
Because I was surprised by his statement and curious where he got
that idea from. Since the statement I found gave a fairly different
picture. YMMV. - And since I know Arnold - the head of the GNU Awk
maintainers - from various public and private conversations, Waldek's
interpretation (and yours, of course) irritated me, to say the least.

 You can ask Arnold what he meant.  I saw reasonably recent post
by him implying the he is still using tcc.  And a seqence of
posts from 2013, where he reported problem with tcc and later
wrote that new version (containing fixes) works to compile
gawk.  His messages indicated that he cared about compile
speed and considerd tcc to be fast.
  From message about to tinycc-devel dated 'Sun, 06 Jan 2013':
 : It is quite fast, which is a significant pleasure compared to
: gcc or clang.
 There he reports problems, later message confirms that changes
to tcc fixed the them.
 Let me summarize facts as I see them:
- he used tcc to develop gawk

I don't see that from what you have written here.  Perhaps it is true, but unless I have missed something, you haven't given evidence of that. Note that "used tcc /while/ developing gawk" is not at all the same thing as "used tcc /to/ develop gawk".  The tools you use to develop something are your main tools that help you produce good, working code. gcc is the tool he uses for get correct code - tcc is merely for quick turnaround testing.  (Again, let me stress that it is possible that he did use tcc as a main compiler during development, but I don't think you have shown that.)

- he said that tcc can be used to compile gawk

Yes.

- he complained about speed of gcc/clang and noted that tcc is fast.

He said that tcc is "quite fast", faster than gcc or clang, and that he liked that it was fast.  That is not the same thing as a direct complaint about the speed of gcc or clang - though clearly he would have been happier if those compilers had been faster.  (And we all would be happier if they were faster - even those of us who find gcc fast enough for our needs.)

If that is not an endorsement, than what is?
 

It is saying that tcc is a tool you can use to compile gawk, and praise of its speed relative to gcc and clang.  An endorsement would be saying that it is the compiler he likes to use or recommends using.
If I write a program and say it can run on Linux or Windows, that is not an endorsement for Windows.  Even if I say it will run a lot faster and smoother on Windows, it is still not an endorsement - perhaps there are other aspects that I consider more important and which work better on Linux (say, stability of the program, or the ability to handle bigger data sets).  And even if I say the program runs best under Windows, I am not endorsing Windows for anything other than the use of that program.
Again, perhaps he /does/ prefer tcc - either specifically for building tcc (rather than developing it), specifically for developing it, or in general for all his compilation needs.  But you haven't shown that, and I don't get that impression from a "it can be compiled faster with tcc" comment.
(As an aside, who would ever compile gawk, other than the developers and people building *nix distributions - who would all be using gcc or clang for the job?  How much weight should we give the compiler endorsement of one guy who maintains an old project, and for which almost all users use pre-compiled binaries build using a different compiler?)

Concerning statement that you found, "mediocre code", I think
this is about speed of generated code.  If I would write
about tcc I would use different words to make is clearer,
but this is fair warning for people who want to install
and use gawk.  For me testing using gcc before commit sounds
like common sense.  Still, the snippet says "He recommends
using it for regular development".  He could say "I do not
recommend using tcc", or "use at your own risk".
 Concerning fairly different picture, I do not know what
"in the past the quality has varied" means.  If that means
that there are reccuring troubles after 2013 fixes, than
this somewhat spoils the picture.  If that is about what was
before 2013, then this sounds like reasonble disclaimer.

I would take that to mean that because of previous known problems, he does not entirely trust the compiler's correctness now, and worries about current unknown bugs.

 Anyway, the point was about using 'tcc' for developement
and clearly Aharon Robbins was serious about using 'tcc'
for developing 'gawk'.  He reported problems to 'tcc'
developers and AFAICS the problems got fixed (Googler finds
messages from 2013 but no later reports of troubles).