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toofastforyahuh Apprentice
Joined: 18 May 2004 Posts: 164
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Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 7:09 pm Post subject: |
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You only need to rebuild the whole system when an ABI changes so as to break compatibility between, say, old .so files and new binaries that rely on them. (Very typically this is the C++ ABI, since the C ABI has been stable for years. As if I needed another reason to dislike C++...) This doesn't happen too often anymore, but has happened at least twice in the last 5 years. If your gcc is relatively recent, a newer one probably isn't going to require a full system recompile.
Do not fall into the trap of thinking "OMG new gcc version must do a better job and give faster binaries!" because that isn't true. Quite often the opposite. I gave up benchmarking xmame 5 years ago because the downward trend (between gcc and glibc updates) was too depressing. The gcc project cares about performance to a good degree, but it isn't their primary obsession when they have so many architectures to maintain and other bugs to fix. That's why there are still proprietary compilers --- there's always an extra 15% speedup to get somewhere. |
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verdeboy2k n00b
Joined: 27 May 2006 Posts: 23
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Posted: Tue Jun 22, 2010 1:08 am Post subject: |
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Yeah, I only emerge -e world when something breaks big time, and I don't feel like sorting through 536 package blocks and just want it fixed. I didn't even know my GCC had updated till I had to check for a programming project! |
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