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Re: [GCC 3.x] Performance testing for QA
- From: "Timothy J. Wood" <tjw at omnigroup dot com>
- To: dewar at gnat dot com (Robert Dewar)
- Cc: Peter dot Sasi at t-systems dot co dot hu, aj at suse dot de, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2002 15:41:53 -0700
- Subject: Re: [GCC 3.x] Performance testing for QA
On Monday, September 2, 2002, at 02:47 PM, Robert Dewar wrote:
Dear GCC people,
Allow me the humble question to ask you if it would possible to
employ a simple yet efficient testing method from real life as
opposed to the SPEC* (artificial) test?
Interesting that someone should think that the gcc compiler is an
artificial test (it is one of the SPEC tests :-)
This doesn't seem odd at all. A vanishingly small number of people
actually build the compiler itself. It makes sense to use code that
normal people actually use every day as benchmarks, so things like
MP3/Ogg encoders/decoders, DivX encoders/decoders, and possibly
rendering glyphs with FreeType could provide another set of useful
benchmarks. Clearly a bunch of work would need to be done to isolate
the effects of the compiler from the effects of improvements in the
algorithms and underlying OS, but more people actually use these
applications than the compiler itself.
(It's also great to have a bunch of scientific code as benchmarks,
but code that Joe Bob might use should make an appearance too).
I only reason I think its nice to have the compiler bootstrap as part
of the benchmark is to make sure that the compiler is fast. Instead, I
think it would be more interesting to see how fast the compiler could
build all the other benchmarks -- not how fast it could build itself :)
-tim