Intel C/C++ Compiler 8.0 Released

Peorth writes "Intel has released version 8.0 of their Intel C/C++ compiler for both Windows and Linux. This release has been rumored for a long time to contain 100% GCC source and binary compatibility. It seems great strides have been made in advancement of that goal, as well as of its performance, but it may have a long way to go yet. Has anyone had experiences with it yet, either good or bad?"

Comments

Re:What's the big deal?

[Screaming Lunatic]

Others have mentioned performance. But the more compilers that you put your source through, the more robust your code will become. Different compilers emit different warnings. Different compilers adhere to different parts of the standard. Putting your code through different compilers makes your code easier to port to other platforms.

At work we use both MSVC 7.0 and ICC 7.0. We'll probably also use MSVC 7.1 for our next product cycle. And maybe Comeau or GCC in the future. At home I use GCC and ICC.

Re:Question

[AtrN]

Actually, yes I do. A little while ago I was doing some micro-optimizations (i.e. not algorithmic), using gcc 3.3 and icc v7 on FreeBSD and testing the results on a number of processors available to me: Athlon XP, PIII and PIV Xeons.

With my problem/code the Intel compiler generated code ran faster on the Athlon XP than gcc 3.3's code using its XP switches and other "go fast" options. Using whole program optimization resulted in a program running considerably faster than the gcc 3.3 generated binary. icc is also stricter in some ways regarding syntax and C++ gets to use the EDG parser (if its still using it, can't see why not).

The various posts here from people going "why bother" show a great deal of naivety. There are good reasons you want to use multiple compilers other than just the fact that icc can generate better code than gcc (in many circumstances, other tests may show the opposite result, YMMV). For starters its going to pick up a different set of errors. Now gcc is pretty good at producing useful warnings, a whole bunch better than Visual C++ for instance, but it isn't perfect, adding icc into your toolkit helps you find problems in your code. A more important reason however is to avoid the mono-culture introduced with everyone using gcc. Years ago we called it "all the worlds a VAX", then it became "all the worlds a Sun", now its "all the world's Linux (with gcc)". A bit of variation (in implementation, not interface) is a good thing.

Re:so, any source distributions able to use this?

[cakoose]

so if compiling from source with gcc doesn't give you any benefits, I doubt using icc would be any better

That's a strange conclusion. The Gentoo comparision is a comparison of two -march settings on GCC. ICC is a whole different compiler.

Re:kernel

[jarek]

To tell the truth, not even all gcc versions are compatible with the specific version of gcc that is currently supposed to compile the kernel. Gcc compatibility is a moving target and kernel developers do not switch to the latest gcc version as soon as it appears. Examples of this are kgcc vs gcc in some distributions. Unless icc becomes the official compiler for the linux kernel, I doubt it will ever compile the kernel in a predictable way (what ever predictable means in this case). /jarek