Steven Bosscher wrote:
On Wednesday 14 September 2005 10:53, Robert Dewar wrote:
Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
(If so, I'm wondering what it's going to buy the interested parties,
because I have a hard time seeing one of the large GNU/Linux distributors
switching to a compiler different from FSF GCC for Itanium.)
Surely this depends on relative performance ...
My guess is that there are more important things than performance,
such as stability, community support, maintenance burden, etc.
I would add single compiler for other linux (and non-linux) ports, more
compact code for Itanium (sometimes 2 times more compact), many
additional features (last ones are mudflap and stack protector). If it
was perfomance only, people would have switched to Intel, ORC or
Openimpact compilers long ago. But according Gelato poll, most of
Itanium users (like 70%) prefer to use gcc than other compilers.
