Dave McGuire wrote:

>   While I agree in principle with your points, I cannot and will not
> accept the notion that modern GCC "gives back" enough additional
> functionality to justify its increased size and decreased speed over,
> say, v1.38, the first release GCC I ran.
> 
>   Shouldn't that relationship be a bit closer to linear?  Sure,
> there's a lot of, say, Pentium optimization crap in there...but is
> that even being executed when I run it on a VAX?
> 
>   Good, clean, high-performance programming isn't a standard of
> "yesterday".

I'm certainly not going to defend gcc here but it probably boils
down to the basic consideration of development cost (even in free
software development, gcc has received funding from companies which
were used to pay developers); doing the Right Thing as good as
possible is probably a lot more expensive than just doing it in a
way so that it works "well enough", especially if, in the case of
gcc, "well enough" means "fast enough" on halfway current systems.
I'm quite sure, though, that some people with really big projects
would object to that, where even on the fastest machines,
full compile cycles take hours or even days but then again they could
probably afford compilers that better suit their needs.  Perhaps it's
a "you get what you pay for" issue and I think what I get with gcc
for what I pay for it isn't that bad.

--mkb