LLVM IR influence on compiler debugging

[Walter Bright]

On 7/7/2012 4:08 PM, Adam Wilson wrote:
> On Sat, 07 Jul 2012 11:48:44 -0700, Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 7/7/2012 8:38 AM, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
>>> On a high-end 4-core x86, building LLVM and LDC can usually be
>>> done in less than an hour, even when building them in optimized mode.
>>
>> Building dmd on my Windows box takes 26 seconds, optimized, using a single core.
>
> Build speed of the compiler itself is an utterly trivial matter, my primary
> concern is speed for the end-user. Even the build speed/memory usage of my
> projects is not a problem, I can always throw more money at hardware. For
> example, I am considering making the next round of developer box updates to
> Intel Xeon E1650's with 32GB RAM.
>
> Gentlemen, from a business prospective, compiler and/or project build times are
> the least of your problems. How well the code performs and most importantly the
> accuracy of the code generation is of key concern.

Throwing more hardware at a problem isn't going to get you a 120x increase in speed.

While you're right that the customer cares not how long it takes to build the 
compiler, the speed is important for the edit-compile-debug loop of developing 
the compiler. For me, it matters quite a bit.