Now that Clang/LLVM has got this finished, I'm wondering what a system would look like with:
... * Clang/LLVM as the system C/C++ compiler
Slower
I'm developing a tiny game engine in C(11) and I've built profiling into the core, and I profile many of the math-heavy parts separately as well. Clang 3.3 actually almost always does better than gcc 4.8 here. Not by much, but there you have it. You should take a look at the SLP vectorizer, which will come enabled in -O3 as of Clang 3.4 but can already be enable separately with -fslp-vectorize.
So for single threaded code I'm already leaning towards Clang. OpenMP is going to get integrated as well, as of then, all bets are off. Exiting times to be a C/C++ dev... (or any other kind, for that matter, LuaJIT never ceases to amaze me).
He probably just forgot to type the word "former" by accident, as he also mentioned Almaty, which afaik is a city in Kazakhstan (part of the former Sovient Union).
I also use Dev-C++ for my windows development, I find the interface to be superb in not getting in my way, while not being dog-ugly or slow.
Conversely, I was searching for an alternative for linux (yes, I'll learn vi/vim some day, just not now), and what I found was Geany.
It starts up at the flick of a finger and manages to look a lot like Dev-C++ (perhaps more polished even). The only thing I dislike about it is its (intentional) weak project
support, but that could conceivably be fixed with the nice plugin system. So, Geany is very lightweight and supports quite a lot of languages, it has its default settings
such that if you have the necessary compilers installed (which is basically mostly true on most linux systems, or can be done with one line at the shell), it'll work
out of the box. The same for python, perl, etc.
Then I noticed that it also has a windows port, that comes with its own GTK+ runtime (all nicely contained in Geany's folder, and nicely uninstalled if you want), I tried it
and while the first startup is not as fast (due to the GTK+ libraries needing to be loaded), all the rest is just as snappy. Ofcourse the windows version needs a little more help
to get started, but not _that_ much more. All you basically have to do is install MingW and set your $PATH to search MingW/bin.
So basically the only problem with Geany that still remains (for me), is that it doesn't really support projects like Dev-C++ did, so for now you basically have to make your own
makefiles. This could also be viewed in a positive light ofcourse, as learning about makefiles will prove to be a good skill if you want to do some open source contribution. But
I'm sure it could get tedious as well (haven't done many large projects lately), so someone developing a plugin would be really nice, and probably not too hard as well.
Well, I've been ranting and promoting long enough now, time for Geany to promote itself, give it a spin (it's free, the only cost is your time;) ).
I fully agree with your post (I prefer C over most other languages myself for some weird reason, but if it n eeds to be made *right now*, I'll use Python/Perl/Bash/...).
However, there is an addendum I'd like to make here:
Some programming languages force you to think in ways that are actually beneficial to the speed of your code, and can outpace the "normal" C program significantly.
For example, a few months ago I was forced to write something concerning an AI algorithm in Prolog. Now, I was cursing and cursing at it, because the constraint solver built into the prolog compiler was so goddamn restrictive, but that's how constraint solving works. Every time I was thinking to myself: "if I'd have been allowed to build this in C, it would be done yesterday, and probably be faster to boot!"
But when I ended up finishing it and running it, it was blindingly fast, and I queried my professor about it. He told me that another student some time ago was thinking the same thing as me, and actually made a C variant. It ran 4x as slow as the prolog equivalent even after spending quite some time optimizing (interchanging algorithms and even looking at the assembler code, he told me).
Then he told me what was causing this discrepancy, as I had always thought that C was the end all be all of performance. It was the restrictive nature of the prolog solver that caused me to put more brain power into the problem, and as such shift work from the computer to the human. Because those same restrictions allowed lots and lots of optimisations (aliasing comes to mind).
I wish I had mod points right now, because I sure as hell was too stupid to realise that (although maybe I can feel less inferior by ascertaining myself that English is not my mother tongue).
I do feel the need to checkup on "6x7" being the last question though
Shut your yap,
Americans are generally a smart and sane bunch, and talking like that about a group of people so large and diverse only makes YOU sound stupid.
As a European it may not be stereotypical of me to say this, but I believe that in the grand scheme of things, the Americans have been very beneficial to the globe.
If you are a technically savvy person who has delved into a scientific analysis of the pros/cons of nuclear power generation, then I'd like to know why you prefer other
power sources that we have now and are even remotely economically feasible to nuclear power. Because when I had to write a paper (I hope that's the correct translation, it wasn't that big, maybe 20 pages) in my first year of engineering about nuclear energy compared to other energy sources, it started to look real good. (Please don't start saying things like I got my information from wikipedia or other untrustable sources, we weren't allowed to do that, obviously).
That said, are you by any chance also opposed to the use of nuclear fusion for energy generation? I'm just curious as to why you have the viewpoint that you have.
(on a related note: handling nuclear waste is done with the utmost care in every country I've read about, and any gross boundary stepping (like dropping radioactive material in the sea) would most certainly be ended by the larger world community)
Are you somehow suggesting that we are not the best nature has ever produced?
And "best" is subjective anyway... best for what?
More on-topic, what says that the 11 other families wouldn't eventually get an equivalent trait? I mean, we're talking really
short timespans here, biologically speaking. I would say that these experiments can count as proof for many things, but not the "forever closed" theory. I, for one, shudder at the thought of not being able to evolve wings anymore because my ancestors made a big mistake.
While the hypervisor may have tucked away the 3D hardware pretty nicely, there may still be hope for some
3D prowess on the PS3 yet. Maybe some of you have heard of Gallium3D, the new driver framework from Tungsten Graphics (of Mesa/DRI/DRI2 fame)?
In any case, in this article on phoronix, and on some other pages I can't re-find, they're talking about a Gallium driver for the PS3,
which could probably transparantly use the vector processing units as a dedicated 3D card. I for one, am looking forward to this working out.
Sorry for replying to myself but my brain is a bit fried from exams:
concering the post to which I originally replied:
World in conflict is just way too simple an RTS. It's a game for graphics whores, great graphics, decent attempt at a story, boring gameplay. (emphasis mine)
I wish we could take the graphcis (sic) of World in conflict and combine it with RTS gameplay knowhow of Starcraft or supreme commander uhh...
That and they ripped off company of heroes with squads entering buildings and they didn't even do a good job of copying CoH Of course, this was also in Ground Control II, the spiritual predecessor to World in Conflict, made by the same company (Massive Entertainment).
Yet everyone knows that the CoH makes have managed time travel, so I guess my point is moot.
And the fact that WiC is mediocre as a RTS is debatable, but you should really have a look at a game where the non-resource gathering
really shined: Ground Control. The very first Ground Control, which appeared somewhere around 2000, is in my mind still the best Real Time Tactics
game ever made (and can be gotten for free on Fileplanet right now). In fact, every multiplayer game that was played, was played with no reinforcements.
This means: you choose the loadout of your (2) dropships, and that's what you get, nothing more, nothing less. It was superb.
Contrary to popular opinion, I have found a properly managed Windows XP (turn unnecesary services off, and I consider themes to be a necessity, I am a graphics whore after all) to be reasonably light on resources. At least not heavier than a similar GNOME/KDE install.
I'm not arguing with the speed and coolness the likes of a properly configured Openbox/xcompmgr (preferably on ArchLinux) can provide, though.
At least, that's been my experiece, and I've had my fair share of PC's, all of them on dual-boot.
Ubuntu is many things (such as incredibly easy to use), but I would certainly not call it a 'fast' distro. In fact, none
of my 3 PC's run ubuntu (with or without Compiz) very happily. And of my 4 friends that dabble in Linux, 1 has found it
to be satisfactory on the speed front. Maybe its just me and my bad luck though, because the plural of anecdote sure
isn't data;).
(My two most recent PC's are a Pentium M 1.60 Ghz with 512 MB RAM and a AMD Athlon 5600+ X2 with 2 GB Ram)
Maybe it's the figure they use to contrast it with other kinds of coolers, I bet they decided that the heat they harvest can be seen as something that wouldn't have been used any other way and as such can count as "free" percents.
i.e.: Electric only, this model would get 50% efficiëncy, as would other comparable models from other companies. Yet thanks to a power source not directly of your own making, they can decrease the electric input for the same output, perhaps making as much as 70% efficiëncy out of the "electricity".
Amen, I currently run foobar2000 under WINE on linux (runs quite well).
To the protesters: yes, I've tried many a native linux player (Rhythmbox, BMPx, Exaille, Amarok,...),
of which Exaille was my favorite (it's still installed). I would kill for a native equivalent for foobar,
but it just isn't there. (or I missed it, in that case, please enlighten me)
Sooo, if you don't like the smell, shoot it in her first and then go down? No, the other way around. Also, it sounds like a semi-legit way of telling if someone's been busy lately.
It would freak the shit out of me if my parents knew all things about me that you seem to
know about your kids.
But somehow, deep down inside, I feel that I'm going to become like you when I'm a parent, because,
y'know, I _can_. Yet I don't want to be, I want to be blissfully ignorant of what my kids are up to, so they can experience the same things I've experienced (i.e.: not being watched all the time, being disgusted by some freaky porn from some friend who I still like, having "interesting" conversations with peers). It's like two sides of me will constantly be at odds with each other, and I bet the Big Brother type will win, big time.
I've always preferred the simpler stuff.
Geany for Linux and Dev-C++ for Windows, they have a compile/build button and syntax-highlighting
(although Dev-C++ only emboldens type clarifiers like int and char). More than enough for me:)
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Now that Clang/LLVM has got this finished, I'm wondering what a system would look like with:
... * Clang/LLVM as the system C/C++ compiler
Slower
I'm developing a tiny game engine in C(11) and I've built profiling into the core, and I profile many of the math-heavy parts separately as well. Clang 3.3 actually almost always does better than gcc 4.8 here. Not by much, but there you have it. You should take a look at the SLP vectorizer, which will come enabled in -O3 as of Clang 3.4 but can already be enable separately with -fslp-vectorize.
So for single threaded code I'm already leaning towards Clang. OpenMP is going to get integrated as well, as of then, all bets are off. Exiting times to be a C/C++ dev... (or any other kind, for that matter, LuaJIT never ceases to amaze me).
He probably just forgot to type the word "former" by accident, as he also mentioned Almaty, which afaik is a city in Kazakhstan (part of the former Sovient Union).
Thank you for a short and _very_ informative post, mod up!
I also use Dev-C++ for my windows development, I find the interface to be superb in not getting in my way, while not being dog-ugly or slow.
;) ).
Conversely, I was searching for an alternative for linux (yes, I'll learn vi/vim some day, just not now), and what I found was Geany. It starts up at the flick of a finger and manages to look a lot like Dev-C++ (perhaps more polished even). The only thing I dislike about it is its (intentional) weak project support, but that could conceivably be fixed with the nice plugin system. So, Geany is very lightweight and supports quite a lot of languages, it has its default settings such that if you have the necessary compilers installed (which is basically mostly true on most linux systems, or can be done with one line at the shell), it'll work out of the box. The same for python, perl, etc.
Then I noticed that it also has a windows port, that comes with its own GTK+ runtime (all nicely contained in Geany's folder, and nicely uninstalled if you want), I tried it and while the first startup is not as fast (due to the GTK+ libraries needing to be loaded), all the rest is just as snappy. Ofcourse the windows version needs a little more help to get started, but not _that_ much more. All you basically have to do is install MingW and set your $PATH to search MingW/bin.
So basically the only problem with Geany that still remains (for me), is that it doesn't really support projects like Dev-C++ did, so for now you basically have to make your own makefiles. This could also be viewed in a positive light ofcourse, as learning about makefiles will prove to be a good skill if you want to do some open source contribution. But I'm sure it could get tedious as well (haven't done many large projects lately), so someone developing a plugin would be really nice, and probably not too hard as well.
Well, I've been ranting and promoting long enough now, time for Geany to promote itself, give it a spin (it's free, the only cost is your time
I fully agree with your post (I prefer C over most other languages myself for some weird reason, but if it n eeds to be made *right now*, I'll use Python/Perl/Bash/...).
However, there is an addendum I'd like to make here:
Some programming languages force you to think in ways that are actually beneficial to the speed of your code, and can outpace the "normal" C program significantly.
For example, a few months ago I was forced to write something concerning an AI algorithm in Prolog. Now, I was cursing and cursing at it, because the constraint solver built into the prolog compiler was so goddamn restrictive, but that's how constraint solving works. Every time I was thinking to myself: "if I'd have been allowed to build this in C, it would be done yesterday, and probably be faster to boot!"
But when I ended up finishing it and running it, it was blindingly fast, and I queried my professor about it. He told me that another student some time ago was thinking the same thing as me, and actually made a C variant. It ran 4x as slow as the prolog equivalent even after spending quite some time optimizing (interchanging algorithms and even looking at the assembler code, he told me).
Then he told me what was causing this discrepancy, as I had always thought that C was the end all be all of performance. It was the restrictive nature of the prolog solver that caused me to put more brain power into the problem, and as such shift work from the computer to the human. Because those same restrictions allowed lots and lots of optimisations (aliasing comes to mind).
I wish I had mod points right now, because I sure as hell was too stupid to realise that (although maybe I can feel less inferior by ascertaining myself that English is not my mother tongue).
I do feel the need to checkup on "6x7" being the last question though
Shut your yap, Americans are generally a smart and sane bunch, and talking like that about a group of people so large and diverse only makes YOU sound stupid.
As a European it may not be stereotypical of me to say this, but I believe that in the grand scheme of things, the Americans have been very beneficial to the globe.
If you are a technically savvy person who has delved into a scientific analysis of the pros/cons of nuclear power generation, then I'd like to know why you prefer other power sources that we have now and are even remotely economically feasible to nuclear power. Because when I had to write a paper (I hope that's the correct translation, it wasn't that big, maybe 20 pages) in my first year of engineering about nuclear energy compared to other energy sources, it started to look real good. (Please don't start saying things like I got my information from wikipedia or other untrustable sources, we weren't allowed to do that, obviously).
That said, are you by any chance also opposed to the use of nuclear fusion for energy generation? I'm just curious as to why you have the viewpoint that you have.
(on a related note: handling nuclear waste is done with the utmost care in every country I've read about, and any gross boundary stepping (like dropping radioactive material in the sea) would most certainly be ended by the larger world community)
The Protector will make sure that polar bears around the universe face the consequences...
Toolkits will probably move slowly, but I know the Awesome window manager is going to be moving over ASAP. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awesome_(window_manager) )
Are you somehow suggesting that we are not the best nature has ever produced?
And "best" is subjective anyway... best for what?
More on-topic, what says that the 11 other families wouldn't eventually get an equivalent trait? I mean, we're talking really short timespans here, biologically speaking. I would say that these experiments can count as proof for many things, but not the "forever closed" theory. I, for one, shudder at the thought of not being able to evolve wings anymore because my ancestors made a big mistake.
While the hypervisor may have tucked away the 3D hardware pretty nicely, there may still be hope for some 3D prowess on the PS3 yet. Maybe some of you have heard of Gallium3D, the new driver framework from Tungsten Graphics (of Mesa/DRI/DRI2 fame)?
In any case, in this article on phoronix, and on some other pages I can't re-find, they're talking about a Gallium driver for the PS3, which could probably transparantly use the vector processing units as a dedicated 3D card. I for one, am looking forward to this working out.
concering the post to which I originally replied:
World in conflict is just way too simple an RTS. It's a game for graphics whores, great graphics, decent attempt at a story, boring gameplay. (emphasis mine)
I wish we could take the graphcis (sic) of World in conflict and combine it with RTS gameplay knowhow of Starcraft or supreme commander uhh...
Contrary to popular opinion, I have found a properly managed Windows XP (turn unnecesary services off, and I consider themes to be a necessity, I am a graphics whore after all) to be reasonably light on resources. At least not heavier than a similar GNOME/KDE install.
I'm not arguing with the speed and coolness the likes of a properly configured Openbox/xcompmgr (preferably on ArchLinux) can provide, though.
At least, that's been my experiece, and I've had my fair share of PC's, all of them on dual-boot.
And here I was thinking a (hot) fusion reaction DID expell neutrons! --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Overview
Ubuntu is many things (such as incredibly easy to use), but I would certainly not call it a 'fast' distro. In fact, none of my 3 PC's run ubuntu (with or without Compiz) very happily. And of my 4 friends that dabble in Linux, 1 has found it to be satisfactory on the speed front. Maybe its just me and my bad luck though, because the plural of anecdote sure isn't data ;).
(My two most recent PC's are a Pentium M 1.60 Ghz with 512 MB RAM and a AMD Athlon 5600+ X2 with 2 GB Ram)
Strangely, you only lost me when you said girlfriend. Good anti-Microsoft rant for the rest, though.
Maybe it's the figure they use to contrast it with other kinds of coolers, I bet they decided that the heat they harvest can be seen as something that wouldn't have been used any other way and as such can count as "free" percents.
i.e.: Electric only, this model would get 50% efficiëncy, as would other comparable models from other companies. Yet thanks to a power source not directly of your own making, they can decrease the electric input for the same output, perhaps making as much as 70% efficiëncy out of the "electricity".
Amen, I currently run foobar2000 under WINE on linux (runs quite well).
...),
of which Exaille was my favorite (it's still installed). I would kill for a native equivalent for foobar,
but it just isn't there. (or I missed it, in that case, please enlighten me)
To the protesters: yes, I've tried many a native linux player (Rhythmbox, BMPx, Exaille, Amarok,
Nope, I believe that was Novaya Zemlya ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Zemlya ).
Svalbard has been kinda neutral territory for some time. (kinda, it's a weird situation)
Yep, it was Photosynth, a cool looking project from a company bought by microsoft. It's site is: http://labs.live.com/Photosynth.aspx
It would freak the shit out of me if my parents knew all things about me that you seem to know about your kids.
But somehow, deep down inside, I feel that I'm going to become like you when I'm a parent, because, y'know, I _can_. Yet I don't want to be, I want to be blissfully ignorant of what my kids are up to, so they can experience the same things I've experienced (i.e.: not being watched all the time, being disgusted by some freaky porn from some friend who I still like, having "interesting" conversations with peers). It's like two sides of me will constantly be at odds with each other, and I bet the Big Brother type will win, big time.
I've always preferred the simpler stuff. Geany for Linux and Dev-C++ for Windows, they have a compile/build button and syntax-highlighting (although Dev-C++ only emboldens type clarifiers like int and char). More than enough for me :)