On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, S h i v wrote: > > Why not just use gcc itself ! > > 1. One needs to go through unnecessary hoops to make some of the > softwares build with sunpro. Using abstraction layers, maintaining lot > of patches, fixing the (sunpro)compiler as being done for KDE, etc.
It seems that there must be a reason for wanting to do this. There is certainly value to using one toolset. There is value to Sun with maintaining/developing their own toolset so that they are able to offer innovative features peculiar to their hardware or Solaris. GCC is not under Sun's control and has recently become less supportive of Solaris. > I have heard the argument of performance and seen the benchmarks. I am > not convinced that this argument is strong enough to tilt the balance. The Sun compiler is clearly *much* better for SPARC code. To date I have yet to see the Sun compiler produce x86/AMD_64 code which runs as fast as GCC and the Sun compiler is less reliable when compiling x86 code (e.g. throws an internal assertion when compiling my code, which compiles with every other vendor's compiler). Today I used 'spot' with Sun's compiler on Opteron and was quite pleased with the results. Much cheaper (free!) than Intel VTune and works for Solaris. This sort of value-add is difficult to achieve with GCC. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
