GCC Summit 2006
Forklift
Originally uploaded by sfllaw.
I look forward to going to Ottawa every June for the GCC Summit. I've gone every year since it started in 2003 and have no intention of stopping. That's because it feels so much like a family reunion. Let me explain.
The core people who have worked on GCC have been doing it for years. They're people who used to work for Cygnus Solutions, back before they were bought out by Red Hat. They're people who work for CodeSourcery. And they're people working for Intel, HP, and IBM who are compiler writers first and employees second. And they all know each other like dysfunctional family.
When I first showed up at the first Summit, Jim and I were the new kids. We had just finished typesetting the Using GCC manual that was published by GNU Press. So I went around absorbing compiler technology by osmosis, and trying to get as many developers to sign by pre-press draft.
The nice thing about the GCC Summit is that there is only one track of talks. So you never have to choose between two talks that you're interested in. It's a little bad though, since you're always tempted to check your e-mail when there's a lull in the interestingness of the presentations.
This year, the focus seemed to be on profiler-driven optimizations. I'm not really sure those are very profitable, as they actually require developers to run their applications as part of the build system. And we all know that humans are lazy. But perhaps I underestimate the heroics that build-systems people will go through to squeeze out that extra ounce of performance.
Danny Berlin and Kenneth Zadeck talked about dataflow analysis and getting rid of the terrible implementation inside GCC. I had heard horror stories about flow.c before, but have yet to actually look inside it. Their talk has disuaded me even more.
The last thing that sticks in my mind is the GDB talk, which seemed to be the only toolchain talk this year. But these things wax and wane.
I skipped out on the afterparty this year, which meant that I couldn't help with the monumental challenge that awaits us after each summit. But I shall return.