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

[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
Received on Sun Jun 5 04:15:08 2005