Lies, damn lies and bench... oh wait (was Re: [squeak-dev] Interesting news re Dolphin ST)

Jason Johnson jason.johnson.081 at gmail.com
Sun Sep 28 07:07:26 UTC 2008


On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Stéphane Rollandin
<lecteur at zogotounga.net> wrote:
>> Keep in mind that while programming languages
>> have been largely "commoditized"  the best implementations of many
>> languages still cost money.  E.g. you want the best C compiler?  It's
>> not GCC.  Buy the Intel compiler and watch your code run twice as
>> fast.
>
> wrong, according to the people there (from google "icc vs gcc", first
> results page):
> http://blog.alphagemini.org/2008/03/icc-vs-gcc-43.html
> http://www.osnews.com/comments/19462
>
> business is business, quality is quality, saying business => quality is an
> ideological statement that needs yet to be proven. IMHO :)
>
> Stef

Um......  Did you actually read the links you posted?  In the first
one, the ICC bar (program run time) is *less then* half the size of
the gcc one and the blogger mentions that GCC has a long way to go at
the end of the article!

Look, I'm as glad that there is free software out there for me to use
and learn from as the next guy (and I even contribute with a
"libre"-free license).  But there is absolutely nothing wrong with
people who sell software.  They make a strategic choice.  Companies
like RedHat choose to use a software product as a loss leader to drum
up dollars for their support infrastructure.  Places like Cinicom
chose to forgo the potentially risky loss leader strategy.  If someone
thinks one of these strategies is some kind of "guiding light" and the
other is morally bankrupt then that person is, in the best case,
incredibly naive.



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