On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 3:50 PM, Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > > There is no doubt that especially on Solaris, the Sun compilers are > better than the GNU ones in terms of speed.
I automatically doubt sentences that being "there is no doubt", so I tried searching for any articles with benchmarks comparing GCC and Sun's compilers. I found one February 20, 2009 article in a few minutes of searching. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sun_studio_gcc&num=6 It concludes: "With LAME MP3 encoding, Sun Studio 12 was dramatically slower and it fell behind at Ogg encoding. In GnuPG and SQLite, the compiler made little difference. Some of the Sun Studio slowdowns may be explained by a majority of the open-source projects targeting GCC as their compiler and catering their compiler flags to the GNU Compiler Collection with little or no optimizations for Sun Studio. At the same time, however, it is also worth noting the current stable series for GCC is 4.3. The BlastWave packages for GCC4 were at version 4.0.2, which is outdated and since then GCC has picked up support for SSE4 and various other features. Sun Microsystems currently has some compiler engineers looking over these results, and if they have anything interesting to say, we will be sure to pass it on." This social factor -- "open-source projects targeting GCC as their compiler" -- are certainly real. Anyway, there are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks, and I'm sure the above can be criticized. It is a real problem that many open source projects target mainly Linux + GCC, so Linux + GCC really gets an unfair advantage. So we should certainly pursue getting Sage to build with non-GCC so we don't contribute further to this bias. > Sun have an interesting tool called 'Cool Tools - GCC for Sun Systems' > > http://cooltools.sunsource.net/gcc/porting.html > > > which has has a GNU interface (and so takes GNU options), but the actual > compiling is done with a Sun compiler. > > Intel make similar systems for Linux and OS X, > > http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-compilers/ > > so one builds with a compiler which looks like gcc, but it is fact > superior. There are two issues with the Intel system though > > * The Intel compiler is not free, unlike the Sun compiler. > * I would suspect that gcc is better optimised for i386 than SPARC, so > the advantages gained would be lower than on SPARC. (This is only a > suspicion - I have not checked it). > > IBM do likewise > > http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/lnxpcomp/v8v101/index.jsp > > where is says a subset of gcc commands are accepted. > > My personal preference is to get rid of all these stupid GNUisms, so > Sage is portable and works with any half-reasonable compiler. But these > tools can't be discounted. > > I've got no idea of the cost of these Intel and IBM compilers. I suspect > they are not cheap, but the Sun one is free. > > Dave --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
