Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
Perhaps the question is a bit silly, but I thought I'd ask it anyway.
I'm compiling some software for a Linux/uClibc on a mipsel platform.
Right now I'm using gcc 3.4.4 to do both native and cross-compilation.
A while ago gcc 4.1 was released, and boasts many optimizations.
As the mipsel devices I use are rather slow - here comes the point of my
question: will binaries I compile with gcc 4.1 be faster than these
compiled with 3.4.4?
I don't really care about compilation time; I'm only concerned with the
speed of the binaries made with gcc 3.4.4 and 4.1 (i.e., will gzip
compiled with gcc 4.1 compress a given file faster than gzip compressed
with gcc 3.4.4).
Both gcc-3.4.4 and 4.1 are available to you, so in theory you could
answer this question empirically (assuming that you also have the gzip
sources and a file you could test the resulting gzip executable on).
You don't say what version of Binutils you are using. But with recent
snapshots of Binutils you can use '-Wa,-mno-shared, -ffunction-sections
-fdata-sections -Wl,--gc-sections' to good effect on mips[el]-linux.
David Daney
