4 ms·
May I ask what the n refers to then?
by rat9988 7y ago
May I ask what the n refers to then?
- bsder 7y agoUm, anything internal to the compiler that it is allocating. It could be number of registers spilled (graph coloring algorithms are NP-complete but have useful heuristic solutions ... most of the time), number of macros allocated, loop iterations unrolled, etc. If any of those things has a quadratic (or worse(!)) behavior, they may make compile times blow up if you hit a pathological boundary condition. And, sometimes I might even want that quadratic behavior optimization. If I'm trying to squeeze every single byte out of a program because I am on a memory constrained system, I'm probably pretty happy to let the compiler churn for a couple of hours to crush my program into memory if it means I don't have to start rewriting code that is nominally correct and risk introducing bugs.