

A Linux Compiler Deathmatch: GCC, LLVM, DragonEgg, Open64, Etc... - bconway
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=15657

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yread
Link to the results:

[http://global.phoronix-test-
suite.com/index.php?k=profile...](http://global.phoronix-test-
suite.com/index.php?k=profile&u=staalmannen-11555-17359-8826)

~~~
jws
Scroll down for bar graphs of random polarity with occasional spurious entries
using a pittance of available visual coding.

I think giving each compiler a hue and encoding the optimization level as
saturation would have been a useful addition to the spatial organization.
Rephrasing the data so that "big = good" would also save much of the mental
"what am I looking at?" diversion at each chart view.

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onan_barbarian
If only there was some sort of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation out
there with a wide variety of CPU intensive benchmarks to evaluate
architectures and compilers.

Not getting a SPEC license makes this strictly amateur hour. And yes, I know
compilers are tuned for SPEC, but you'd at least get repeatable high-quality
results on a wide range of different programs.

SPEC isn't necessarily representative of every program out there, but his
weird (and small) collection of microbenchmarks and random fragments of code
is even less interesting than SPEC.

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simias
Is there some actual content on the middle of all these ads? I gave up on page
2.

~~~
NickPollard
Some points that appear to come out of the data:

tcc (tiny c compiler) appears to be really good - it scores very well in both
compilation time and execution speed

open64 (added in second batch of tests) also appears very good, for the same
reasons

clang is quite slow.

Programs compiled with gcc -O2 often run faster than with -O3.

~~~
pieter
I think you're referring to another benchmark. AFAICS, this one doesn't test
clang or tcc.

~~~
NickPollard
From the main article link I clicked through to the forum thread[1] where the
tester posted his benchmarks. There's more than one there as he progressively
tested different compilers and different setups; I looked at the first 2-3.

[1]
[http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?29090-CompilerDeat...](http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?29090-CompilerDeathMatch-
surprising-results)

~~~
dialtone
The forum thread on page 3[1] however reads:

    
    
      side-by-side comparisons do however indicate that Clang performed as good or better than ICC or GCC when -O2 is used!
    

And through the link by yread you can see that clang really performs very well
overall.

[1]:
[http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?29090-CompilerDeat...](http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?29090-CompilerDeathMatch-
surprising-results/page3)

------
zdw
They're testing on an Atom platform, which is pretty horrible if you're
comparing performance.

Many of the optimizations that compilers can do nowadays rely on better than
an in-order "barely better than a Pentium" CPU.

