At 11:05 AM -0600 12/16/02, Puneet Kishor wrote:
I recently read that gcc is a dog. (I am heavily paraphrasing for the sake of brevity). The same program compiled with a different compiler ran significantly faster.Yes, it is, though it's getting less dog-like as time goes on. Generally when comparing GCC to $paid_for_compiler, GCC will lose, often by a lot. GCC, at least through version 2.x, was remarkably Lisp-like internally, which made for some interesting impedance issues when the target CPU wasn't mostly a stack-machine. You'll see more of a performance hit when targetting register rich architectures (like the PPC) than you will on register starved architectures like the x86.
Having said that, I don't know about the internals of the 3.x series of GCC.
That specific article itself is irrelevant. But what inquiring (and clueless) minds want to know, is my OS X perl slower that my ActiveState perl because of the compilers used to compile the perl binary in the first place.While yes, the numbers you got do *not* mean anything, unfortunately. Not because of compiler differences but because of hardware differences. Laptops aren't optimized for speed, they're optimized for power usage and size. This adds in a not-insignificant amount of overhead--with a disk-heavy benchmark I wouldn't at all be surprised to see a factor of two, three or four speed hit for the laptop, especially if you were running the laptop on battery power.
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
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