[linux-audio-dev] [ot] [rant] gcc, you let me down one time too many

Tim Goetze tim at quitte.de
Sun Jun 5 00:10:22 UTC 2005


[Jack O'Quin]

>  Anticlimax:  ;-)
>
> Our hero sees the error of his ways.  Eschewing the grotesque
> compromises imposed on C++ by its quixotic quest (??) for "Object
> Oriented Programming Without Garbage Collection" (OOPWGC), he returns
> to sanity, living happily ever after, writing robust, portable
> programs in C, "the world's most widely used assembly language", where
> what you see is what you get, regardless of the underlying platform
> and compiler.

The trouble with our surely no less quixotic hero (coming up with this 
drama has made me know him so well I could sometimes swear he's alive) 
is that he's lazy, and he's gotten addicted to the seductions of 
cleverness, always looking for ways to evade the load of work that a 
more modest way imposes on the aspiring.

So, he's a bit reluctant to go back to the verbose and honest ways of 
plain C. He might even have trouble fluently reading and writing 
25-character identifiers, so shortened is his patience and so 
re-evolved his typing.

I'm not a big fan of turning this case into a tragedy, so I'm quite 
hopeful there'll be Part II to be played to the same public, in which 
this conflict will be ultimately resolved.

> Indeed.  I feel your pain.  (And, you haven't really explored the full
> range of ABI incompatibility problems.)

Nor would I care to :) though what I've experienced is enough to 
affect the full range of what I used to think of as a main work, the 
effects being pretty much the equivalent of a nuclear blast to be 
precise. I've looked up a bit of the public documentation of the 
vtable movement decision process when gcc 3 was in the works, and the 
only clearly stated reason seems the Solaris compiler having the habit 
of placing the vtable at this + 0. Maybe I should have delved deeper 
in the hope of finding a better reason but reading that somehow made 
me turn my interest elsewhere; the prospect of fighting this decision
seemed unattractive anyway (gcc 3.3 was already shipped so late was I 
to notice).

However, I'm constantly rethinking the way I make music and how I use 
the computer to aid me, so the next attempt, if there'll be one, can 
reflect newly found concepts.

Thanks for the good words,

Tim



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