Re: Baby X is bor nagain

On 17/06/2024 15:09, Malcolm McLean wrote:

On 17/06/2024 07:22, James Kuyper wrote:

On 6/13/24 10:43, Michael S wrote:

On Thu, 13 Jun 2024 13:53:54 +0200
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

...

I know more than most C programmers about how certain C compilers
work, and what works well with them, and what is relevant for them -
though I certainly don't claim to know everything. Obviously Bart
knows vastly more about how /his/ compiler works. He also tends to
do testing with several small and odd C compilers, which can give
interesting results even though they are of little practical
relevance for real-world C development work.
>

>
Since he do compilers himself, he has much better feeling [that you
or me] of what is hard and what is easy, what is small and what is big,
what is fast and what is slow. That applies to all compilers except
those that are very unusual. "Major" compiler are not unusual at all.

>
The problem is that Bart's compiler is VERY unusual. It's customized for
his use, and he has lots of quirks in the way he thinks compilers should
work, which are very different from those of most other programmers. In
particular, compilation speed is very important to him, while execution
speed is almost completely unimportant, which is pretty much the
opposite of the way most programmers prioritize those things.
>
>
>

Yes, but that's probably what you want.

Who is "you" here?  Possibly "you" is Bart, but it is certainly not /me/.

As a one man band, bart can't bear Aple and Microsoft in priiducing a compiler which creates highly optimised code that executes quickly. And that's what the vast majority of customers want.

I believe I can figure out the words you used, despite the spelling mistakes, but I can't figure out what you are trying to say.  One man band developers generally want the best tools they can get hold of, within the limits of their budgets - home-made tools can be part of that, but not for something like a C compiler.

But say that 0.1% of customers are more interested in compilation speed. Now, Apple and Microsoft might not even bother catering to, what is to them, just a tiny market and a disraction for the development team. So bart can plausibly produce a compiler which does compile code correctly, and much faster than the big boys. And there are about 28 million pepole in the world who derive thetr living as computer programmers. 0.1% of that is 28,000, Charge 10 dollars each, and that's a nice little business for one person.
 

Your connection with reality is tenuous at best.
People /do/ like faster compilation speed, though it is rarely a problem in practice for C.  But no one who has used a real C compiler would want to step down to Bart's tool just to shave a second off their build times.
It is quite believable that some people will find big tools intimidating and want something that they view as smaller and simpler, but not for compiler speed.  And that market is already saturated by things like lcc-win and tcc.  (These are, unlike Bart's tool, compilers that make a significant effort to be correct for standard C.  Bart's compiler is made for his own use only, and is only likely to be correct for the subset of C that he wants to use.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but his tool is far from being ready to sell to others as a C compiler.)