Comment by dsharlet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsharlet | Hacker News Reader

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I really disagree with this. I work on compilers, so I feel for the people who work on GCC, but, I think it is totally unreasonable to expect the average GCC user who might have encountered this bug to be capable of fixing this themselves.

I hacked around in clang for a bit for a compiler project. I think it would have taken me weeks or months to get to the point where I was able to fix the equivalent bug (if it existed) in Clang. Compilers are big, hard to debug projects. And, IMHO, the Clang/LLVM code is much more approachable than GCC. Not all developers are hobbyists that can afford to detour from their work for weeks or months to ramp up on GCC to fix this.

I'd also point out that this is the kind of bug that could exist and be triggering in a lot of code as we speak but no one (besides the author of this blog post) have caught it. I think it's insane to ignore a bug like this.

>I really disagree with this. I work on compilers, so I feel for the people who work on GCC, but, I think it is totally unreasonable to expect the average GCC user who might have encountered this bug to be capable of fixing this themselves.

That's not my take on it. It doesn't read like an urge to fix it yourself, rather it's literally an urge to consider why you haven't, in order to understand why others also have not.

"Not all developers are hobbyists that can afford to detour from their work for weeks or months to ramp up on GCC to fix this" seems like an appropriate response and probably more or less the point that the GP wanted to make.

I think "fix yourself" in this context means implementing a workaround in your code, not fixing GCC.

I don't think it does. ambrop7, DoofusOfDeath and dsharlet are IMO quite obviously talking about patching the GCC codebase and go out of their way to talk about the priorities of GCC maintainers, how approachable its codebase is and how hard compilers are to debug in general.

> I really disagree with this. I work on compilers, so I feel for the people who work on GCC, but, I think it is totally unreasonable to expect the average GCC user who might have encountered this bug to be capable of fixing this themselves.

I totally agree. GCC is reputed to be a complex beast, and few people have the spare time to get to the point where they can make the fix.

To clarify my original point: The bug apparently wasn't bad enough to cause anyone like yourself to either (a) fix it, or (b) pay someone else to fix it. So I'm at peace with this at a kind of meta/process level.

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