[Ffmpeg-cvslog] CVS: ffmpeg/libavcodec/i386 h264dsp_mmx.c, 1.15, 1.16

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 11:39:16AM +0100, Guillaume POIRIER wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 3/8/06, Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal.cx> wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 04, 2006 at 11:31:47PM +0200, Ismail Donmez wrote:
> > > Maybe off topic but linux kernel recently dropped support for gcc < 3.2 , it
> > > might be worth to reconsider gcc 2.95 support in ffmpeg too.
> >
> > Yes and as we all know Linux sucks...
> >
> > > P.S: No flamewar intended
> >
> > Bad idea suggesting this then... :)
> 
> Somehow, I see it logical to have someone having an old distro (let's
> say RH 7.0) and wanting to build a recent userland app, like FFmpeg
> from CVS... On the contrary, having an old distro and upgrading to
> latest 2.6 seems quite a more invasive task as it requires to upgrade
> the a fair deal of core apps which gravitates around the kernel.
> So IMHO it only sound logical that the kernel dev folks drop old
> compilers, and userland dev folks keeping compatibility with old
> compilers which haven't gone dodo yet.

The issue at hand isn't what's common case with distros, but whether
gcc3/4 is better or worse. For many users it's worse. If you compile a
lot of software from source, the slowness of gcc3/4 is extremely bad.
With gcc3, the performance gains in the resulting binaries were
marginal or often even negative (i.e. worse performance than 2.95). I
hear gcc4 has cleaned up this regression to some extent, but they need
to improve compiletime performance before it's viable for everyone to
use.

Rich