Does Linux Need Another Commercial Compiler?

Lurks asks: "My company, Codeplay, is set up to develop new and innovative compiler technology for the games industry. Our C compiler, VectorC, is a cutting edge vectorizing compiler aimed at games and multimedia applications that demand high performance generally through hand-optimized assembly. I'm writing to ask the burning question on our minds, is it worth porting VectorC to Linux? In fact, we're already targeting Linux as part of the PlayStation 2 version albeit not generating x86 code of course. A Linux port would see us converge this work with our Win32 compiler and such an undertaking would certainly be popular with our Linux loving techies! One caveat worth mentioning now is that the current version of VectorC is plain C only. 2.0 with full C++ compatibility is due early next year."

"Of course, commercial realities will rear their ugly head and we must consider that Linux isn't perhaps an obvious choice for a compiler aimed at games and multimedia applications. Given the certain degree of hostility towards commercial closed-source products of this nature, perhaps the idea should be consigned to the pet-project back burner for the future rather than rolled out as a commercial product?"

Comments

Well.. can you clarify some things?

[mindstrm]

Do you mean converting your compiler to run under linux, or making it able to compile code FOR linux (and if so, under what platform).

IF it's a playstation/games developmetn compiler.... then the only reason to port it to linux is if you want to offer linux as a development environment for playstation games. Is it? What's the benefit?

Re:Scientific apps (was Re:Well.. can you clarify.

[Lurks]

Scientific applications usually need more than single-precision arithmetic ... so it may be more useful on the Pentium4 for scientific applications :)

You're obviously quite right. We get a surprising amount of interest from the scientific/academic community. High tech compilers that vectorize are nothing new in this area, but generally they're Fortran compilers for mainframes etc.

I'm guessing that with the power of desktops these days and the prevalence of C/C++, micro based scientific computing is looking more attractive.

It's quite spooky to see all these high energy research labs (Eek!) in our web logs. I wonder how many of these people understand the precision issues with most vector units out there.

Perhaps the Pentium 4 will become a standard choice for scientific computing because of the double precision cable vector unit. Just as well we put a lot of effort into SSE2.

Mat 'Lurks' Bettinson, Codeplay Ltd.

Re:Keep Linux products OPEN Source

[Derkec]

IF Linux ever gains the popularity we all hope it will, it will stop being the land of all open source. Games will not be open sourced and other really good products that people worked hard enough to earn money from won't be either. Realize that. It's already happening. People need to feed their families, so they sell their hard work.

This guy here is selling a product on Win32. I assume they are making money. The question is simply, if we provide Linux users the option to use our software on that platform, will anyone buy it? They are doing a good thing here. They are taking an application that presumably gives the Win32 platform some advantage and offering to make it available to Linux users. I hate to say this, but if MS Office was ported to Linux, not only would it sell, but the platfom would become more popular. Just because you as an individual flee from closed source, does not mean that a company should not market a closed source product to the Linux platform.

MMmm.

[Fixer]

I like the idea of a specialized compiler being available if I need it (I'm stepping into the 3D waters).

But I have a small warning for you: If your compiler really does produce awesomely better code in that particular area, then if that area becomes popular with the GCC crowd, you are going to see alot of work spent on optimization. In other words, your product may be a spur to make GCC competitive with VectorC.

And I would also point out that I think that if VectorC, available for Linux/someArch, does NOT stir the GCC developers to improve, then your specific market doesn't exist on Linux.

Really sucks: Either you eventually face competition with GCC, or your product bombs on Linux.

Benchmark questions

[David E. Smith]

First, do the benchmarks, and see if it's needed/useful under Linux (I'm sorta assuming x86 here). The benchmarks page mentioned above (it's here, btw) lists their VectorC compiler, Intel's compiler, and MS Visual C. Add a column to that labeled "GCC 3.0". Let me see just how much of a performance boost I'll get out of your product over the one I'm using (as opposed to these other products I'm not using).

Yeah, this'll probably require doing much of the porting work before determining whether there's a market for it. It's called R&D, and it does sometimes lead to dead-ends. Deal.

You can sell on Linux, try the scientific comm'ty

[Sax Maniac]

This reminds me of a talk I had with our CEO when interviewing. I asked him if a port of our debugger to Linux was viable. He said sure, it was in the works, but didn't expect it to make any money at all. I thought the other way around- people have Linux on lots of systems because it's free, and now they're realizing they might need some good tools for it.

A few months later, TotalView was released for Linux x86. Guess which is one of our biggest sellers?

I went to SC2000 (the supercomputing tradeshow) last year. Almost everybody I talked was running MPI on Linux on PCs. Linux has made huge inroads in the scientific community working on ahem, clusters, of Linux boxes. It's actually quite amazing, consider the Linux market in this segment was close to nil a few years ago. Something about cash-strapped institutions not having to pay high OS licensing fees...

Anyway, it goes to show you that even though there is a free alternative (gdb/ddd) you can sell tools for Linux if you do things the free things can't, or do it better.