On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 07:02:52AM -0600, Art Haas wrote: : Newer GCC releases are _much_ better at compiling this file than older : releases. GCC-3.3 is better than GCC-3.2, GCC-3.4 is better than GCC-3.3, : but best of all is GCC-3.5, as it compiles this file in usually less than : 5 minutes and requires the least memory of all. I'm building on a 200 MHz : Pentium - no joke - so the latest GCC has been a trememdous improvement. : : Even though GCC has been getting slower for compiling other code, when : building Parrot, and in particular the core_ops_cg.c file, GCC has been : getting much, much better.
Hmm, if it's getting better for you and worse for others, that might well mean that GCC is just getting better at figuring out when to do a worse job of compiling. "Gee, they just handed me a 200k function. Maybe I'll just skip the basic-block analysis today..." So you really need to compare the outputs of the two compilers before you can call it "better" in an unqualified sort of way. I'm not saying it isn't better--it might well be that they've performed a miracle. Or maybe they're using Parrot code as the stress test for GCC, and optimizing on the basis of that. That'd be cool...sort of like optimizing for a particular set of benchmarks. Larry
