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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Baby X is bor nagain
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2024 17:08:42 +0200
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On 25/06/2024 13:18, bart wrote:
> On 25/06/2024 09:19, David Brown wrote:
> 
>> At no point in all this does anyone care in the slightest about the 
>> speed of your little toys or of the cute little tcc.  tcc might be 
>> ideal for the half-dozen people in the world who think C scripts are a 
>> good idea, and it had its place in a time when "live Linux" systems 
>> were booted from floppies, but that's about it.
> 
> Yet, projects like mine, and like tcc, show what is possible: just how 
> fast should it take to turn lower level code into machine code.
> 

That is not the be-all and end-all of compilers.  Fortunately, real 
compiler developers think differently from you.

Tools like tcc - and possibly your compiler - are better than nothing. 
And if you really do have a situation where small size is a concrete 
requirement (such as Live Linux floppies last century), they can be very 
useful.  But when you have the option of using something much better, 
you use something much better.  Disk space costs nothing.  RAM space 
costs peanuts.  Processor time is dirt cheap.  A major cost is 
/developer/ time, so you use tools that save the /developer/ time, not 
tools that save the developer's computer time.  And for a lot of C code 
- at least, a lot of code that should be written in C, the run time of 
the final results are a cost.

> Since as I said I don't see much difference in such a task compared with 
> doing the same with assembly, or translating textual data into binary.
> 
> So, if someone is using a tool (and perhaps language) that takes 1, 2 or 
> 3 magnitudes longer for the same scale of task, then the trade-offs had 
> better be worthwhile.

An order of magnitude longer than negligible is still not worth 
bothering about.  Compiler time - for C - does not matter.

> 
> And it shouldn't be because the developers of the tool are lousy at 
> writing performant code. Or they don't care. Or they expect customers to 
> just use faster and bigger hardware.

Do you think the developers of gcc don't care?  Or they are just bad at 
writing code?  Do you know how laughable that is?  It is not /quite/ as 
bad as your usual paranoia that the developers behind C, gcc, Linux, 
make, and countless other things you don't understand created them just 
to annoy you personally.

> 
> You think it is all totally pointless? Then fuck you.
> 

I didn't say your /compiler/ was pointless.  I said your "benchmarks" 
were pointless.

And I have said your compiler (and tcc) is a toy in comparison to gcc 
(and clang, MSVC, and other serious tools) for C development.  That 
again does not mean it can't have some uses - if you like it and use it, 
then fine.  Just don't expect other people to share your enthusiasm for 
such limited tools, and certainly don't expect anyone else to share your 
obsession for meaningless benchmarks and imaginary "lines per second" 
figures.