sturlamolden wrote: > Robert Kern wrote: >> - gcc does not optimize particularly well. > That is beyond BS.
> The more recent gcc releases optimize as well as any > commercial compiler. This is an outrageous claim. Having worked a bit doing compilers, I no of no commercial compiler that would have a leg to stand on if it claimed it optimized "as well as any commercial compiler." There are compilers and compiler experts out there in the weeds that can (and regularly do) compile the hell out of code. I took classes from one of these guys, and now he works in a little company that does exactly that for particular customers and problems. Uncle Timmy, used to work for some of the places that employed some of these experts. There is no "fully optimized state" for compiled code (if the resultant instruction stream is greater than a few hundred instructions); everyone approximates optimization. It is almost inevitably a grey trade-off of compile time to speed of resulting code over certain distributions of problems. To say "gcc does a credible job of optimization" would not be outrageous. To say "gcc optimization beats tool X on benchmark Y on hardware Z by 1.237%" is a claim that could be made supportably, but it would probably have to be accompanied with "using optimization switches gcc-W for gcc and X-W for tool X." I expect gcc does a reasonably good job of optimization, but the best optimizers (as far as I know) are done by a relatively small number of people who fully understand the workings of the optimizer and its current workload, the workings of the hardware in question as well, and have chosen a portion of that workload to become expert in. Gcc does not have that expertise available to support people to do things like that (nor does it need to). They don't need (or want) to become wed to one architecture, but to do the best optimization you must at some point get married. The gcc team does a great job at what they do; blind defense of them discredits the good work they do. --Scott David Daniels [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
