April 2002 Dev Tools Include gcc Update

snyperm writes "stepwise.com indicates that the April 2002 Developer Tools have been seeded to developers and is scheduled for release sometime in the coming weeks. The improvement of gcc 3.1 alone is noteworthy as arstechnica indicates there should be somewhat substantial increases in speed ahead for Mac OS X. One step closer to 10.2!" Also included, according to the story, is a ProjectBuilder 2.0 beta.

Comments

hmm

[seann]

13: 60% [FP ] 4.58s Spherical Harmonics Legendre Polynomial
13: 64% [FP ] 4.31s Spherical Harmonics Legendre Polynomial

~19%
14: 38% [INT] 15.54s Dhrystone 2.1 (500k Iterations)
14: 45% [INT] 13.18s Dhrystone 2.1 (500k Iterations)

~11%
15: 32% [FP ] 9.15s Whetstone 1.2 (1000k Operations)
15: 36% [FP ] 8.23s Whetstone 1.2 (1000k Operations)

Those are some SEXY benchmarks. (bold = new gcc)

GCC changes

[Lally Singh]

These notes describe a pre-release of GCC 3, based on the GCC compiler version 3.1 for C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++. GCC 3 is the biggest change for GCC in ten years and represents two years of development. It offers the following benefits over GCC 2, the compiler that shipped with the Mac OS X 10.1 Development Tools:

• Faster compilation times due to new precompiled header mechanism. Now C++ code can take advantage of precompiled headers as well. See Precompiled Headers.
• Better code optimization and generation. If you avoided turning on optimization in the past, now would be a good time to try it again. See Optimization.
• Better C++ support. In addition to supporting precompiled headers for C++, GCC 3 contains the following improvements:
  • A stabler and more efficient application binary interface (ABI).
  • A new C++ standard library, including better support for the Standard Template Library.
  • Better compliance with the ISO C99 and ISO ANSI C++ specifications. Note that the new ABI means you need to recompile all your C++ libraries and frameworks.

This would be karma whoring if I wasn't capped out...