What every compiler writer should know about programmers [pdf]

Re:What every compiler writer should know about programmers ... by Gibbon1 on Thursday March 03, 2016 @08:01PM (#11221291)

I'm just a crummy engineer that writes a fair amount of embedded firmware. When this subject comes up I've found mainstream programmers attitude towards these sorts of concerns to be actually hostile. A lot of programmers think when specification gives the compile maintainers a choice between making the code do something platform specific or something silently malicious, to do the malicious thing in order to 'teach the programmer a lesson'

I'm with you. These guys aren't helping us, our customers or the people that pay the bills.

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Re:What every compiler writer should know about programmers ... by bluecalm on Thursday March 03, 2016 @09:45PM (#11221729)

These guys put thousands of hours to maintain and improve a compiler you get for free. Thousands of programmers welcome each and every release jumping to a change log. Every major GCC version lately introduced significant optimizer improvements, new diagnostics, new warnings, faster compile time etc.

How can you claim these guys aren't helping "us" is beyond me. I am developing a small project with just a little over 1000 customers. GCC team efforts over last few years saved thousands of dollars in hardware and electricity costs as well as hundred of hours of computation just because GCC 5.3 produced very significantly faster code than GCC 4.x for low x.

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Re:What every compiler writer should know about programmers ... by pjmlp on Friday March 04, 2016 @04:21AM (#11222794)

The part you are forgetting is that the commercial compiler vendors do the same things.

These issues aren't specific to gcc, rather to the culture of C and C++ compiler writers, regardless how those compilers are developed.

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