Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

GNU GCC Vs Sun's Compiler on a SPARC

Posted by timothy on from the real-numbers dept.

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."

3 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. ah 2.95.3, we hardly knew ye by dingbatdr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    To me this was the most interesting line of the article:

    Sun's compiler was the clear winner. Surprisingly, the older version of GNU's GCC beat 3.3.2 by a very slim margin.

    One of my favorite version numbers (2.95.3) is still getting good press. Cool.

    dtg

    --
    The truth is an offense, but not a sin.------R. N. Marley
  2. Bad Statistics? by Josh+Booth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    See Tony Bourke's older article, which conluded that 64 bit binaries are slower than 32 bit binaries. This set of statistics he posted has totally obliterated his previous conclusion. He had only used GCC 3.3.2 and assumed that compiling for both 32 and 64 bits were optimized similarly. However, in most of the benchmarks he did with Sun's compiler, 64 bit programs came ahead of 32 bit ones. This means that GCC 3.3.2 is not as well optimized for his computer for 64 bits as for 32 bits, while the Sun compiler is. If he had just looked at his own data, he would have seen that.

  3. Re:Why does this suprise ANYONE by j-pimp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Add to this that compiler gets better with each release and I think it will soon be what Linux is for UNIX - making the rest obsolete.

    I was talking to some Novell engineers at Linux World. They all love watcom. The watcom toolchain is being ported to linux. It already self bootstraps. Novell owns SuSE. I expect SuSE will be making use of watcom for linux in the future. All my projects are going to use Watcom from now on. I'm sick of the annoying voo-doo neccessary to make a cross compiler between unix and mingw/cygwin/djgpp using gcc. Watcom lets me cross compile out of the box. Granted the IDE needs some work, but wmake very powerful, though unique. All the basic unix userland you expect for a makefile (cp, rm, install) is a builtin command and calls to the tool chain (compiler, linker etc) are loaded as DLLs saving system calls, thus improving performance.

    GCC is very mature, popular and supported, but its not going to be the only kid on the block for long now that Watcom is open source.

    --
    --- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.