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> That's the first thing that came into my head. Yes, thank you, I WANT a compiler that Just Works. The last thing I want to debug is stuff my compiler throws up when it thinks it's smart.

Then you should stay away research and toy programming languages and stick to tried and tested languages and compilers. And perhaps refrain from commenting on discussions related to them if you don't have anything to bring to the table.

And I'm pretty sure it was a joke, kinda like Linus' "real men write their own device drivers" back in 1992 or so.

> By the way, GCC, in case you're listening? Fuck you!

There's a well known software company in Redmond, WA and a famous hardware company in Santa Clara, CA that can provide you with high quality tested compilers in exchange for a little bit of money and agreeing to their licensing conditions. No one is holding a GNU to your head.

GCC is an awesome project that has liberated computing in various fields. 20+ years ago you had to pay a lot of money for C compilers that were worse than GCC in every way.

That attitude isn't going to get you very far. GCC is a team effort and if you don't want to take part in it, then don't.



> Then you should stay away research and toy programming languages and stick to tried and tested languages and compilers.

Aw hell. Back in 1992, during my Software Engineering class project, we discovered a bug in GCC where it produced wrong answers if we swapped the position of two unrelated functions. We found multiple bugs in GCC, in fact.


Have you ever had to debug badly-generated code?

It was a friendly fuck you, btw.


His point is not that one compiler is good or not good or bad or not bad. His point is that you're veering pretty far from the discussion by singling out a compiler unrelated to the originally posted one with rather distasteful vitriol. Being anonymous on the internet can lend to more immature discourse, but it's up to the human behind the keyboard to pull back the reigns.


His point attempts to be that I'm ignorant of the work that went into GCC, a compiler I've been using since about 1997 IIRC on almost every platform it supports, and that I'm generally a bad person.

My point is that a compiler that Just Works is sometimes preferable to one that Does More imperfectly.


Yes that was the first clause of your original post but evidently not the last.




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