Re: ridiculous amounts of padding

[Marc Lehmann <pcg at goof dot com>]

[going through my mail folders, this is a bit late]

On Thu, Jan 14, 1999 at 06:51:41PM -0700, Jeffrey A Law wrote:
>   > If someone would be interested in helping me tracking down code
>   > differences, I am very interested...
> I hope someone will.

While I can't help with tracking down code size differences, the benchmark
suite records the stripped executable size of each benchmark it generates.
Although this data is not yet evaluated anywhere (its not even in the
database), all reports come with this information.

If somebody tells me what to do with that data we can at least keep an eye
on it in the future.

>   > But until someone corrects me (or I find a solution myself), OpenBSD will
>   > have to stay with gcc 2.8.1 (as much as I would like a change, personally).
> I'd be real suprised if in general gcc2.8 produced better code than egcs;
> there may be localized issues of course, but I'd be real suprised if on a
> global basis gcc-2.8 was better.

Actually, thats exactly what I get to hear. Recently someone send me
a report that he intends to publish (I'll post an url here), in which
he compares gcc-2.8, egcs and pgcc using his number-crunching c++
program. His summary was:

If you want a good and fast compiler and do not need the new C++ features
of egcs, then by all means stay with gcc. If you really need speed, use
pgcc, but -O6 -funroll-all-loops, pgcc isn't faster than gcc with -O3.

Of course, that was his own (maybe limited) benchmark, but thats what
counts for him. I also reeceived quite a few similar reports, but these
didn't have hard data in it, i.e. "nothing to report to egcs".

On Fri, Jan 15, 1999 at 03:19:26PM -0700, Jeffrey A Law wrote:
>   > Well, unless you have a Spec95 license you can't run that.  However,
>   > I've been thinking about this, and it seems that we could come up with
>   > a "free software benchmark" that is similar in spirit to Spec95.
> Yes.  And one can even use many of the same benchmarks since many are available
> for free.  What you don't get are the datasets or the infrastructure for
> building, testing and reporting information that spec provides.

Maybe you can hint me to some of the smaller ones? The current benchmark
suite is quite sensible to small code changes (which was one of the
goals), but it does not provide an adequate view on the performance on
real world problems.

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