[Beowulf] g77 limits...

[Greg Lindahl]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 05:45:06PM -0500, Mark Hahn wrote:

> these days, gcc does pretty well compared to commercial compilers, if you
> take care to -march, -msse2 and other tweaks.  I can't see why this 
> pretty respectable code quality for c/c++/etc wouldn't also apply to
> fortran.  even the ada and java people seem to be almost happy with 
> gcc's code-gen...

Er, it depends. gcc is a pretty good compiler for integer, but it's
way behind the curve for numerical code and peak options. For Fortran,
there's also the issue that performance-sensitive use of intrinsics
really needs them expanded and optimized in-line. I don't know if
g95 or gfortran have implemented these yet, but I do see people showing
relatively poor performance for those cases.

-- greg
(disclaimer: we sell compilers, but then again, we compare against
gcc in a regular basis...)