Compiler optimization (was: 8086 (was Re: more talking to the

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Fri Nov 14 19:23:26 2003

It was thus said that the Great Pete Turnbull once stated:
>
> On Nov 14, 16:48, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
>
> > I know the IRIX C compiler can do global optimizations but that takes
> > quite a bit of time and processing power; I never bothered with it when I
> > was programming under IRIX. And this was at least 10 years ago so it's
> > margially on topic here 8-P
>
> Maybe you should have. About 1996, I did a project during which (as a
> side-effect) I spent a while looking at compiler output, and comparing
> gcc to IRIX cc. In all the cases I tried, cc took about the same time
> to compile as gcc, but produced faster (and often smaller) code.
> That's not too surprising, really. For one thing, cc used a bigger
> optimisation window. For another, it's written by a bunch of people
> who are very close to the processor it's written for, and they didn't
> have to worry about whether anything would work with some other
> architecture; they could (and did) do extensive re-ordering of
> instructions.

  Oh, I used the IRIX cc compiler. I found it to be a much nicer ANSI C
compiler than GCC, and with full warnings would tell you which section of
ANSI C (chapter and verse) which might cause a problem. If I'm using IRIX,
I would rather use the IRIX cc than gcc. Unfortunately, it now costs an arm
and a leg (then too!)

  -spc (Now that I use Linux, I use GCC ... )
Received on Fri Nov 14 2003 - 19:23:26 GMT