Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001 10:55:56 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: naisbodo AT enteract DOT com cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Support for higher end cpus In-Reply-To: <92rei1$6e3$1@bob.news.rcn.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On 2 Jan 2001 naisbodo AT enteract DOT com wrote: > > I think you will find that gcc produces code that's as good as > > any code made by a proprietary compiler. > > I think you most definitely will not. While we could continue arguing about this till Kingdom Come, someone has already done the footwork of comparing performance of GCC-compiled code to that of other compilers. See: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/6552/compila.html (this URL is mentioned in section 14.1 of the FAQ, btw). Guess what? GCC does seem to produce code that is as good or better than proprietary compilers, including MSVC, according to SET's data in the above page. > But portability comes at a cost. Intel can devote 100% of their > resources to optimizing for a single architecture, and possibly a > single OS and a single libc. Interestingly enough, the compiler for Intel's next-generation IA64 CPUs is GCC: Intel hired Cygnus (now a Red Hat company) to develop the compiler and other development tools for their new chips. I guess they wouldn't do that if GCC was paying too heavy a price for being portable. Or maybe 100% of Intel's resources is not so much anymore?