Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 25 Oct 2007 07:55:00 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: Is gcc thread-unsafe? |
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On Thu, 25 Oct 2007, Nick Piggin wrote: > > Andi spotted this exchange on the gcc list. I don't think he's > brought it up here yet, but it worries me enough that I'd like > to discuss it.
Are you surprised?
The gcc developers seem to have had a total disregard for what people want or need, and every time some code generation issue comes up, there's a lot of people on the list that do language-lawyering, rather than admit that there might be a problem.
It's happened before, it will happen again. I don't think it's true of all gcc developers (or even most, I hope), but it's common enough. For some reason, compiler developers seem to be far enough removed from "real life" that they have a tendency to talk in terms of "this is what the spec says" rather than "this is a problem".
Happily, at least in this kind of situation, threading is a real issue for other projects than just the kernel, so maybe it gets solved properly.
But I have to admit that for the last five years or so, I've really wanted some other compiler team to come up with a good open-source compiler. Exactly due to issues like this (Q: "Gcc creates bogus code that doesn't work!" A: "It's not bogus, it's technically allowed by the language specs that don't talk about xyz, the fact that it doesn't work isn't our problem").
I think the OpenBSD people decided to actually do something about this, and I suspect it had *nothing* to do with license issues, and everything to do with these kinds of problems. I wish them all the luck, although personally I think LLVM is a much more interesting project.
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