Re: Free UNIX for non-commerical use.

From: Andrew Gabriel (andrew_at_cucumber.demon.co.uk)
Date: 07/29/03 

Date: 29 Jul 2003 09:01:31 GMT

In article <bg38em$4lh$00$1@news.t-online.com>,
        "Uli Link" <Ulrich--nO--(dot)-sPAM--Link@Epost.de> writes:
>
>> 1) In the case of games manufacturers, they would indeed loose revenue
>> if they allowed everyone to copy their games. I don't think this is so
>> with UNIX operating systems and compilers. There are not than many
>> home users going to pay more than $1000 on a compiler. They will
>> likely use gcc instead and have to accept the poorer performance.
>
> Don't agree: the optimization of the GCC has become much better:
> in 9 out of 10 times the GCC produces faster binaries than vendor compilers

I benchmarked it against Sun's compilers probably every couple of
years since 1995, and Sun's compilers have always produced faster code,
typically by 10% - 15% on both sparc and x86 in program runtime.
Obviously will depend on the nature of the program -- something i/o
bound isn't going to notice much, whereas something CPU bound might
see even bigger differences than I did.

I also benchmarked it against DEC's OSF/1 compiler many years ago,
and GCC lost out big time to that, but that was probably around 1995/6
and I haven't done that test again since then.

My attempts to benchmark on 88k failed because the GCC optimiser was
simply too broken to produce usable code on 88k. In any case, I had
nothing to compare with as the two 88k system vendors I knew, Motorola
and DG, both shipped (broken) GCC as their native compiler anyway.
(Maybe no one ever wrote any other C compiler for the 88k?)
Again, this is going back to, probably, 1998. 

-- 
Andrew Gabriel
Consultant Software Engineer

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