The Shape of Code

I recently found out that RedHat are investing in improving the C++ front-end of gcc, i.e., management have assigned developers to work in this area. What’s in it for RedHat? I’m told there are large companies (financial institutions feature) who think that using some of the features added to recent C++ standards (these have been appearing on a regular basis) will improve the productivity of their developers. So, RedHat are hoping this work will boost their reputation and increase their sales to these large companies. As an ex-compiler guy (ex- in the sense of being promoted to higher levels that require I don’t do anything useful), I am always in favor or companies paying people to work on compilers; go RedHat.

Is there any evidence that features that have been added to any programming language improved developer productivity? The catch to this question is defining programmer productivity. There have been several studies showing that if productivity is defined as number of assembly language lines written per day, then high level languages are more productive than assembler (the lines of assembler generated by the compiler were counted, which is rather compiler dependent).

Of the 327 commits made this year to the gcc C++ front-end, by 29 different people, 295 were made by one of 17 people employed by RedHat (over half of these commits were made by two people and there is a long tail; nine people each made less than four commits). Measuring productivity by commit counts has plenty of flaws, but has the advantage of being easy to do (thanks Jonathan).