Toon Moene wrote:
Robert Dewar wrote:
Actually for my taste, you have to get a MUCH bigger factor in compile
time before you can call yourself a fast compiler (Realia COBOL by
comparison compiles millions of lines a minute of code on current
PC's, using just one core).
Obviously, apart from comparing a sufficiently large set of compilers on
this, "speed of compilation" is mostly in the eye of the beholder.
Subjectively, as of gcc/gfortran 4.4, our (roughly 1 million lines of
Fortran + 30,000 lines of C) code gets compiled (optimized and
vectorized at -O3) in about 5 minutes on a quad core machine (using make
-j8).
As an absolute number, this tells you nothing. But as a measure of
usefulness, it means that from 4.4 onwards, it is possible to recompile
our complete weather forecasting suite at *every* new run, 4 times a day.
You bet that's sometimes useful ...
Right, and I think once you get down to 5 minutes, then you are good
enough, it is in the minor convenience category to get down to 2 minutes.
The Realia COBOL compiler, written entirely in COBOL, could compile
itself in less than a minute on a 25 megahertz 386, but 5 minutes
would have been fine (of course the compiler was a small program
compared to many of the customer programs, less than a hundred thousand
lines of COBOL).
