Compiler quality

[Greg Lindahl]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 11:01:50PM -0800, John Casu wrote:

> There is one relevant advantage that Windows has over Linux, namely
> the code generation quality of VC++ 6.0/VTune(Proton) vs. GCC/PGI
> for pentium III and beyond.

This is an interesting issue, well worth exploring. Up to the Pentium
II PGI was equal to the best compilers. With the Pentium III, there
are some tricks which work well on Spec95fp (and not spec2000fp) that
allowed the Intel reference compiler to pull ahead, but not all apps
were subject to that trick. But now the Intel compiler itself is in
beta-test on Linux, so...

On AlphaLinux, Compaq has made their compilers available, and the
major difference in performance compared to Tru64 is page coloring. My
weather client's apps don't get any boost from page coloring. So I
don't think I'm losing anything.

-- greg