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GNU GCC Vs Sun's Compiler on a SPARC
JigSaw writes "When doing research for his evaluation of Solaris 9 on his Ultra 5, Tony Bourke kept running into the same comment online over and over again: Sun's C compiler produces much faster code than GCC does. However, he couldn't find one set of benchmarks to back this up and so he did his own."
So, the benchmarks show maybe a 10-15% difference in favor of Sun's compiler. Does that Sun's compiler a "clear winner"? I think not.
First of all, it's far from clear that those differences are real. You can get much bigger differences from just changes in caching behavior, even with the same compiler.
Then, there is the question of whether Sun's compiler is actually correct. A lot of commercial compilers intentionally skirt or break the letter of the ANSI standards once you start enabling optimizations. GNU C/C++ is usually more careful.
Finally, you have to ask whether it matters. So, Sun's overpriced machines using their overpriced compilers run a bit faster than their overpriced machines using a free compiler. So what? If you want bang for the buck, or even just maximum bang, why in the world would you buy a Sun these days anyway?
Those may have been Stallman's original goals, but not necessarily of gcc anymore. Remember that the maintainers of gcc now aren't the original Stallman lead, FSF gcc folks, but of the splinter egcs group that forked gcc because they were extremely frustrated with the progress of gcc under the FSF. Once it became evident that egcs was making progress leaps and bounds past the FSF gcc, (to Stallman's credit) work on FSF gcc was dropped, and the egcs gcc became the official gcc.
People think that "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" was made in comparison between commercial and non-commercial programming models. It actually was modeled on FSF gcc (the Cathedral) and Linux kernel (the Bazaar) development. Eventually, at least in gcc development, the Bazaar won.