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Does Linux Need Another Commercial Compiler?

Posted by Cliff on from the stuff-to-discuss dept.

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?"

1 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Yes by Feign+Ram · · Score: 0, Troll

    We could use some quality C, C++, FORTRAN compilers. Gcc might be the holy grail for the free software Taliban. But anyone who has done serious work knows about it's limitations. And don't give that bull crap about "the best support available on the net" - does'nt work in production environments. It's very important for commercial compilers to be available on Linux as it makes increasing inroads into Games, High end Graphics, Scientific computing etc. Already a lot of engineering software and other kinds of performace-critical software has gone the NT/2000 way, one of the reasons being the lack of good compiler or compilers that are too expensive on other UNIX platforms.

    Actually, Brett Glass has been poiting out for a long time how Gcc has glutted the market for good compilers.

    Anyone know how good the Intel compilers are ?