Re: Unofficial buildd network has been shut down

[Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>]

Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> writes:

> Writing a compiler that takes C source and generates a working binary
> is easy. Writing a compiler that takes source code and finds a
> quasi-optimal binary to express it is hard. Writing a program that
> takes source code and a binary and compares them for equality, under
> the semantic rules of C, is easy (for a given compiler and target
> platform; doing it for all compilers and target platforms at once is
> hard).

Sure, I just mean that this program wouldn't be "count basic blocks
and compare numbers", at least, not with GCC.

I think writing that comparison program for the case of a sufficiently
complicated compiler (like GCC) is certainly easier than writing the
fancy compiler, but nowhere near as easy as writing the cheap
compiler.

But that's neither here nor there; the Thompson point is that your
tool can be corrupted too. :)

Thomas