darcy@druid.planix.com (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) wrote:

> Greg Woods wrote:
> : I personally just fall back on Pike's assertion that the lint checking
> : tool should check for lint, and the compiler should compile, and never
> : the two should meet.
> 
> I have never understood this.

It's actually quite a sensible principle.  After all, it's not for
nothing that plan 9 compiles in 10 minutes flat -- I'd like to see
NetBSD do that!  If you're developing or debugging software, you end
up compiling the same code over and over again, so if your compiler
has to keep all the context around to give you all those warnings,
you're paying over and over again for checks that you'd only want to
run every week or so.

When evaluating compilers for use in a commercial environment,
lost programmer hours waiting for compilation figure reasonably high in
my list of criteria!


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