I suspect that the language-independent and target hardware independent
parts of gcc are as good as they can be, given the constraints imposed
by such things as NP-completeness for a lot of the guts of compile-time
optimization. And given the trend towards dynamic languages like Perl,
Python, JavaScript, Ruby and the bastard cousin of Perl called PHP, the
focus of the open source communities seems to be on making *them* run
more efficiently -- gcc is "good enough" for a Ruby interpreter, a
Python bytecode interpreter, etc. But not, apparently, good enough for
the Parrot virtual machine -- aren't they using Haskell?