3.4.5 is available, has been, so has many older versions. They are keeping current with Nekoware. 4.x is available, obviously less supported but it's there. Using gmake to do distributed builds for both compilers makes me laugh a little because gmake and gcc are married together for optimization. Gcc may be portable but on non-x86 it's slower from my experience versus commercial compilers such as MIPSpro or Sun Studio. (MIPS and SPARC) You cite build times using gmake and gcc on x86 versus gmake and spro on x86, while not taking into account that SPARC still exists, still is supported, still runs current versions of OpenSolaris and has more optimizations than gcc on SPARC. MIPS is a good example, for some of these features such as sse2/3/4/ssse3/mmx/3dnow etc are not available, such as on PowerPC where the only real optimization was Altivec. Try using mplayer using gcc on IRIX/MIPS then try the port to MIPSpro compilers on IRIX/MIPS, the aforementioned result on many machines was sluggish performance, inability to handle the most basic of playback due to large overhead and nasty workarounds. GCC is a nasty workaround in itself, it may be cross-platform but it serves no benefit for key applications which require the optimization. See KDE on older SPARC machines, or any SPARC machine for that matter, there's a demand for KDE on SPARC but GCC has in the past proven at least on Solaris/OpenSolaris to be less than ideal in terms of optimization. Blame the developers if you like, but then explain why spro for example results in much more pleasant experience for the user. For x86, perhaps it's fine, and I don't disagree with that, but I certainly want alternatives to be around, to put pressure on the gnu people to continue to innovate on all platforms regardless. They need a few lessons.
James On Apr 28, 2008, at 12:29 AM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > On Sun, 27 Apr 2008, James Cornell wrote: > >> Is for KDE and X.org, maybe not Inkscape but trust me on this. >> Especially for SPARC systems it means everything. If you've ever >> used GCC on IRIX/MIPS you'd know how convoluted and slow it is for >> non-x86 architectures. For x86 it's still suffering for large >> packages such as KDE. Don't believe me, then try the old KDE >> blastwave package and then try KDE 4 from spec using Spro. I >> wouldn't call it an abstraction either, libtool and gcc toolchain >> is just pure garbage with too much complexity within itself and the >> licensing future is scary. > > These are interesting statements. GCC on IRIX/MIPS (at least your > apparent experience of it) is so old as to not even be considered. > I find that GCC compiles much faster than the Sun compiler for x86: > > GCC 4.2.3: > gmake -j 4 86.56s user 3.93s system 310% cpu 29.189 total > > Sun Studio 12: > gmake -j 4 187.54s user 11.86s system 302% cpu 1:05.90 total > > The above builds are both using libtool, which you describe as "pure > garbage". > > As for the Sun compiler on SPARC, I must agree. With the Sun > compiler, an old 1.2GHz SPARC CPU can stand up and sing like a 2.4GHz > Intel CPU when fed code which was tuned for GCC. > > Bob > ====================================== > Bob Friesenhahn > bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ > GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/desktop-discuss/attachments/20080428/c2a93727/attachment.html>
