Re: Free UNIX for non-commerical use.

From: Greg Menke (gregm-news_at_toadmail.com)
Date: 07/29/03 

Date: 28 Jul 2003 21:10:30 -0400

"Uli Link" <Ulrich--nO--(dot)-sPAM--Link@Epost.de> writes:
> > I have never yet seen gcc 3.2 or previous generate faster code than
> > Sun's C compiler. I've seen improvements up to 10* by switching to
> > Sun's cc, depending on the code. Thats with specific cpu/architecture
> > selection and high optimization selected for both gcc and cc,
> > compiling plain C code.
> >
> Don't have written that this is valid for Solaris on Sparc, but I've never
> seen a factor of ten on the E450 I've compared GCC 2.95.2 and Sun's Workshop
> 4 a few years ago.
> It is maybe??? possible to write code leading to such extreme results, but
> you could never expect such factor in real life. Not even with the code for
> SPECint and SPECfp which no commercial vendor will ignore.
> If you can build the Apache/SSL/PHP4 running 10times as fast as the GCC
> build I will do the packaging for you.
> But Sun will make the next version slower, since no one buys new hw anymore
> ;-)

They are not manufactured examples. The 10* improvement I saw was for
a whetstone benchmark run. I've seen other smaller factors when
compiling gzip & bzip with Sun cc for example- but I have never seen
or measured anything compiled with Sun's cc run more slowly than code
compiled by gcc. Sometimes the speedup isn't all that apparent,
sometimes it is.

This is not to say gcc sucks- I think its a great compiler and I value
it for its ubiquity and because it does generate pretty good code.
Sometimes compiler portability wins over maximum code performance,
sometimes not.

> > >
> > > Another question is the productivity of an integrated dev environment
> and
> > > the turn-around-times.
> > > The tools from Sun are much more comfortable but tend to bring elder
> > > machines to the knees.
> >
> > Please explain how a GUI will make me faster than a commandline, and
> > what a "turn around time" is.
>
> Debugging with multiple source windows is a great help. Syntax colouring
> too.
> Navigation in big projects with hundreds of objects a visual source browser
> is no luxury.
> Agree that editing with vi is faster than anything else. But most of the
> time programmers are thinking or searching, not typing. Just my 2ct. I'm
> more an admin for programmers than a programmer.

I use Emacs for multiple windows and alt-tab to flip to an xterm to
make and ddd to debug. Its not an IDE and there is no mouse fiddling
and no half-baked editor to make things difficult. I would probably
die if I had to use vi... ;)

> Turn around is the time from starting the preprocessor till finish of the
> linker or a fatal error.
> This is the time the programmer waits for the results.

So an IDE speeds this up in what way?

Gregm

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