On Wed, Apr 14, 2004 at 11:21:01AM -0700, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> skaller wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-04-14 at 17:50, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:
> >
> > > Other way of thinking is : what do we need in order to get
> > > binary-only distributions ? [....]
> > >  [re: having to recompile everything]
> >
> > Who cares?
> >
> > I've worked on code where turnaround for compilations were:
> >
> > 1970's -- overnight (Fortran)
> > 1980's -- 2-3 hours (Cobol/Pl1)
> > 1990's -- 20-40 minutes (C/C++)
> > 2000's -- 10-60 seconds (Ocaml)
> 
> Because you are not compiling programs large enough and often enough for
> this to become sheer hell? 

Even if Ocaml compiles much faster that Gcc, compile time still counts
a bit. Consider for example the compile time of the compiler compiling
itself:

with ocaml: make world opt bootstrap is around 10 minutes
with gcc: make bootstrap is about an hour.

(the x86 machines I work on are at home 2Ghz, at work 1GHz).

And there is something more that compilation time: correctly handling
the package dependencies, which has been discussed a lot on this list
recently.

Actually, compilation times still count (but there are features in
Ocaml, notably its module system, which help a lot - compare Ocaml
module compilation to C++ template compilation for example).

Regards
-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH -- basile dot starynkevitch at inria dot fr
Project cristal.inria.fr - INRIA Rocquencourt
http://cristal.inria.fr/~starynke --- all opinions are only mine 

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