Re: A lesson for compiler warning writers

mjr@decuac.DEC.COM (Marcus J. "will do TCP/IP for food" Ranum) writes:
Compilation is (IMHO) the last step in developing code. I want to
      develop in an interactive environment that supports and enhances me as
      much as I want - compiling should be relegated to the phase where you are
      performance tuning and validating before you ship product.


This is sometimes impractical... on any project where there is a serious
amount of computation*, you can't afford to test and run interpreted code
because of the delay involved in testing/using the program. In such
cases, a good incremental compiler+debugger is a necessary adjunct to an
interpreter for high speed development (most modern lisps give you both &
I find that the reduced compile-time is a big plus).


      [We've gotten used to slow compilers, but they can be a lot faster than GCC
      and PCC...


Aren't Borland C++ and Microsoft's Quick C (it's incremental right?) much
better, given the hardware/OS limitations under which they operate?
Ron


* Right now, I'm working on a search program and sometimes bugs appear
after several million nodes are examined. If interpretation slows things
down by 1 order of magnitude, this makes a wait of 3 minutes to recreate a
bug turn into 30...
[Unless they've changed the design recently, neither Turbo nor Quick C are
incremental, just fast. At least one of them has precompiled headers which
you might think of as a rudimentary kind of incremental compilation. -John]
--

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