31 Oct
2011
31 Oct
'11
6:27 a.m.
On Oct 30, 2011, at 10:35 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
>> This brings up an interesting question. Has
compilation speed
>> generally kept pace with Moore's law? Getting C compilation speeds
>> around 5000 lpm wasn't that unusual using a 5MHz 8088 with a hard
>> disk. Borland Delphi running on a P90 claimed 350,000 lines per
>> minute.
>>
>> Could one infer that today's compilation speeds are in the range of
>> tens to hundreds of millions of lines per minute? Do any vendors
>> even advertise a number?
I'll say with a fair degree of confidence that compilers, like everything else, tend
to bloat with more processing power available. They also tend to slow down with the bloat
of the operating system (if disk accesses take more cycles for small operations, for
example). It's frustrating to those of us trying to run modern OSes on older
hardware; NetBSD on my Power Mac 9500 used to run like lightning, and now it's
painfully slow due to a combination of much slower disk accesses and increased overhead in
GCC 4.5 vs. the 3.x series. I don't even want to think how it'll run on my 68k
boxes.
Even on modern (but slower) hardware, it's a problem. Running compiles from the
ramdisk on OpenBSD on my 1.6GHz Atom runs about as fast per file (which really tends to be
the grain I measure against, since the setup/teardown of GCC can be the limiting factor on
slower machines) as my 500 MHz K6-2 did from hard disk ten years ago. Of course, that was
running Linux, so the comparison is not scientifically valid since we're comparing
blowfish to penguins. :-)
- Dave