On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 10:31:47AM -0500, Drew Scott Daniels wrote: > I think it's worth supporting as an interesting program. It might produce > faster binaries, it might produce smaller binaries (usually both go hand > in hand, but not always)
I'd just like to chime in on this. I actually suffered the humiliation of trying to install the Intel compiler out of morbid curiosity today. I was hoping to get smaller binaries from it (not that I'd just it, but just to confirm that gcc has room for improvement ;) ). However, I couldn't seem to find any combination of flags that would reduce the stripped binary size to significantly below 2x the gcc -Os output. The compiler seems to be geared towards C++, and it links in its C++ and runtime libraries to whatever you compile with it. It's worth noting that this probably means that anything you compile with icc contains proprietary code. This is a much more serious problem than icc's own proprietary nature. I can't say that I've looked up the license that these libraries are under, but for some reason I doubt it's DFSG-free.
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