Re: Why does gettext depend on libgomp1?

[Bruno Haible]

Santiago Vila asked:
> The gettext package, when built on a Debian system using recent tools
> (i.e. Debian unstable), seems to be linked against libgomp1.
> ...
> If there is something that we are doing wrong, we'd like to know.

Among the many programs that are part of the gettext-runtime and gettext-tools
packages, only the 'msgmerge' program should have a runtime dependency on
libgomp.

This dependency allows msgmerge to run up to twice as fast on (nowadays common)
dual-core processors, and more on quad-core.

When you can have a 100% speedup by adding 2 #pragma lines to your program,
it would be a shame not to do it. Yes, OpenMP is very easy to use. You only
need to structure the code in such a way that the main loop's iterations can be
executed in parallel, and make sure that code meant to be executed in parallel
is actually multithread-safe. OpenMP cares about starting the adequate
number of threads and about collecting the computational results from the
multiple threads.

Bruno