About one week ago I joined in London many long time GCC friends and acquaintances for a gathering organized by Google (in particular I guess should be thanked Diego and Ian). Only a weekend, and I wasn't able to attend on Sunday morning, but a very good occasion to raise some issues in a very relaxed way, in particular those at the border between areas of competence, which are the most difficult to discuss during the normal work days. If you are interested in a general overview and some notes this is a good link:
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GCCGathering2011
As you may easily guess, the third topic is mine, which I managed to have up quite early on Friday morning thanks to the votes of some good friends like Dodji (the ordering of the topics resulted from democratic voting on Friday evening!). I learned a lot from the discussion: for example that certainly the new C++11 'final' should be exploited largely in the c++ front-end; the various reasons why devirtualization can be quite trick (but I'm really confident that Martin and Honza are going to make a good progress also basing on a set of short testcases which I promised to collect); that, as explained by Ian, the gold linker already implements the nice --icf (Identical Code Folding) facility, which some friends of mine are definitely going to like (however, see: http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12919). I also enjoyed the observations made by Lawrence, where he remarked that in C+11 we are going to see more pointer iterations implicitly produced by the new range-based for-loop and we really want to make sure the loop optimizers are able to deal with those as well as loops explicitly using a counter.
All in all, I really hope we are going to do it again!
