[geeks] galeon Doesn't Suck that much....

Greg A. Woods woods at weird.com
Mon Apr 15 19:27:14 CDT 2002


[ On Monday, April 15, 2002 at 23:07:42 (+0200), Jochen Kunz wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] galeon Doesn't Suck that much....
>
> GCC is knowen to make bad, or at least suboptimal, code on all RISC
> platforms. Installing it to make my live easier is no choice, as I am no
> whimp. I _want_ to die hard. ;-)

You'd better not tell all us NetBSD guys about that -- at least not
until a couple of releases down the line when it might finally be
possible to build more than the toolchain with a third-party compiler.

All of the nearly 50-odd supported NetBSD platforms, running on 10-16
different CPU families to date (depending on how you count them), use
only GCC, and at least four of those are strictly RISC.

I haven't heard too many people complain about NetBSD's performance.
Sure it's not super-dazzling for CPU-bound applications, but in the
general purpose computing applications for which NetBSD is best suited
there's always lots of I/O going on and slowing things down far more
than even the worst compiler.

(i.e. GCC's code is certainly "acceptable", and far from "bad" ;-)

The truth be told you can get far more performance out of huge
applications like galeon/mozilla, kde, etc., by buying a whole lot more
RAM and linking them statically.  Dynamic linking really sucks
performance (or you can get Darwin running and use the pre-linking
feature of their shared library model....)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>



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