Re: GCC for Mac OS X

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Brad Lucier wrote:
> 
> Re:
> 
> > 4. Compiler turnaround.  Mac developers are used to the fast
> > compile times offered by Metrowerks, and are dismayed by GCC's
> > slowness.  Do we need precompiled headers?  Should file system
> > probes be cached?  There are a lot of theories going around, but
> > facts are in short supply.  But however it's accomplished, the
> > compiler needs to go faster.
> 
> Every once in a while I profile the compiler when it seems to be going
> too slowly on my code.  Right now, it seems that compute_flow_dominators,
> [...]

Are you looking at C or C++ code?  Also, are you profiling just cc1, or
the entire build?  If the headers are really massive, and the source files
short, the overall time consumption can shift away from optimization phases.

> > 3. PowerPC code quality.  Apple has more than a few bit-twiddling
> > graphics engineers who pore over inner loops and such.  They need
> > the compiler to generate faster code.  Exception handling and
> > AltiVec support are two specific areas; for instance, Apple is
> > using a big hairy patch from Motorola for AltiVec code gen, but
> > from what I've seen of the patch so far, it seems problematic
> > for mainstream GCC.
> 
> And, as has been said several times already, the FSF needs a copyright
> assignment to include the Altivec code; perhaps you can talk to Kalpesh
> Gala, pesh@ncct.sps.mot.com, Motorola's Altivec evangelist, to get
> Motorola to move faster on this.

Thanks for the pointer!  I was wondering who the Motorola contacts might be...

Stan