14 Nov
2003
14 Nov
'03
11:23 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Pete Turnbull once stated:
On Nov 14, 16:48, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
Oh, I used the IRIX cc compiler. I found it to be a much nicer ANSI C
compiler than GCC, and with full warnings would tell you which section of
ANSI C (chapter and verse) which might cause a problem. If I'm using IRIX,
I would rather use the IRIX cc than gcc. Unfortunately, it now costs an arm
and a leg (then too!)
-spc (Now that I use Linux, I use GCC ... )
I know the IRIX C compiler can do global
optimizations but that takes
quite a bit of time and processing power; I never bothered with it when I
was programming under IRIX. And this was at least 10 years ago so it's
margially on topic here 8-P
Maybe you should have. About 1996, I did a project during which (as a
side-effect) I spent a while looking at compiler output, and comparing
gcc to IRIX cc. In all the cases I tried, cc took about the same time
to compile as gcc, but produced faster (and often smaller) code.
That's not too surprising, really. For one thing, cc used a bigger
optimisation window. For another, it's written by a bunch of people
who are very close to the processor it's written for, and they didn't
have to worry about whether anything would work with some other
architecture; they could (and did) do extensive re-ordering of
instructions.