Re: question about linker

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
- he said that tcc can be used to compile gawk
- he complained about speed of gcc/clang and noted that tcc is fast.
If that is not an endorsement, than what is?

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.

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).

--
                              Waldek Hebisch