GCC code generation sucks.... ([SunRescue] IPC dead as doornail... possible causes? )

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, Dave McGuire wrote:
>   Actually, though this may not seem relevant to many due to the age
> of the platforms involved, GCC has the reputation of generating truly
> superb code on 68K and VAX platforms, and a few other CISC
> architectures.
> 
>   GCC's performance on more modern processors, however, suffers due to
> the fact that the GCC development team seems to have "intel blinders"
> on...they don't seem to understand that there's more to the computing
> world than crappy Intel processors.  So GCC's performance on the
> Pentium-of-the-week is great, while on everything else it blows dog.

Part of the intel advantage is that Intel tells people how to optimize for
their chips and I'm told contributes code to GCC.  I don't know about now,
but historically other platforms released their ASM spec, but not all the
detailed optimization information.

Personally, I think that considering that Linux is the most common
platform for Alpha's now that Compaq should consider beefing GCC up to be
as good as their Dunix compiler.  

I've heard that some of the current embeded risc platforms are pretty
good, like the StrongARM chips (but that's Intel, so maybe that is why).

I'm not an expert on optimization though.  Hell, my programs tend to waste
CPU power everywhere unless it causes the program to be unresposive or
excessively slow.

--
Joshua Boyd