[fpc-devel] Possible idea... "safe" subroutines/methods

[Ben Grasset]

On Sat, May 4, 2019 at 5:31 PM J. Gareth Moreton <gareth at moreton-family.com>
wrote:

> I figure data-flow analysis will address everything eventually, but I
> can't promise the compiler won't become very inefficient as a result.
>

I mean no offense by this, and note that I think you've done more for FPC
in the last year (or two years-ish maybe?) than many people ever have, but
I must say that to me this kind of thinking is very wrong and a big,
specific part of what holds FPC back. It's as though people constantly
forget that *not everything* needs to be some immutable hardcoded part of
the overall compilation process, permanently affecting everyone until the
end of time. In reality you can implement *literally anything at all*, and
even if it takes seven hours to run, as long as it is an opt-in
optimization enabled via a command-line argument or compiler directive
there's no logical reason for anyone to complain about it because, again,
it's *opt-in.*.

And don't even get me started on the subject of "people who care in any way
whatsoever about the size of the FPC executable, even though they are
running desktop hardware and a desktop OS, *not* embedded hardware with an
embedded OS, and so it could not possibly matter in *any* practical way to
them even if the FPC executable was 25x larger than it currently is."
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