[fpc-devel] Messages overhead

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Thu, 15 Jul 2010, schreef Graeme Geldenhuys:

> maintainability is more important to the core team that speed.

No. That is doesn't do justice to all the effort that is put into 
performance optimization. It's not about maintainability being more 
important.

It is about making the right trade-offs between:
- Compiler speed
- Compiler memory usage
- Generated code quality
- Compiler portability
- And indeed compiler maintainability.

Compiler speed can loose from maintainability, but it can also loose from 
code quality; the performance of your application is probably also worth a 
lot to you.

Nevertheless contest the idea that FPC is a slow compiler, I have put a 
lot of effort in optimizing compiler speed over the years. I work with 
many compilers daily, including GCC, Pathscale, Intel, Portland Group.
FPC wins from all of these compilers by orders of magnitude.

Last week I compiled OpenFOAM, a fluid dynamics software written in C++, 
with the Intel compiler. It took 9 hours for 110 megabytes of source code. 
FPC compiles such an amount of code in a few minutes... The fact it can do 
that can be attributed to the Pascal unit system (compared to include 
headers), but just as much to the choice of smart algorithms and 
datastrures and a tons of local code optimizations that were coded over 
many years.

Daniël