Re: does gcc 4.1 generate "faster" binaries than earlier gcc versions?

[Tomasz Chmielewski <mangoo at wpkg dot org>]

David Daney wrote:
> Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
> > Perhaps the question is a bit silly, but I thought I'd ask it anyway.
> >
> > I'm compiling some software for a Linux/uClibc on a mipsel platform.
> >
> > Right now I'm using gcc 3.4.4 to do both native and cross-compilation.
> >
> > A while ago gcc 4.1 was released, and boasts many optimizations.
> >
> >
> > As the mipsel devices I use are rather slow - here comes the point of 
> > my question: will binaries I compile with gcc 4.1 be faster than these 
> > compiled with 3.4.4?
> >
> > I don't really care about compilation time; I'm only concerned with 
> > the speed of the binaries made with gcc 3.4.4 and 4.1 (i.e., will gzip 
> > compiled with gcc 4.1 compress a given file faster than gzip 
> > compressed with gcc 3.4.4).
>
> Both gcc-3.4.4 and 4.1 are available to you, so in theory you could 
> answer this question empirically (assuming that you also have the gzip 
> sources and a file you could test the resulting gzip executable on).

Well, now I have only gcc-3.4.4 available for mipsel/uClibc; I don't 
have gcc-4.1 as a cross-compiler nor a native compiler.
As creating a cross-compiler is not an easy process, I'd have to compile 
a native 4.1 gcc.
And compiling gcc-4.1 on this mipsel device could take a week or so I 
guess (provided everything goes well after I type "make <enter>", which 
is not always the case).
Hence my question.


> You don't say what version of Binutils you are using.  But with recent 
> snapshots of Binutils you can use '-Wa,-mno-shared, -ffunction-sections 
> -fdata-sections -Wl,--gc-sections' to good effect on mips[el]-linux.

I'm using binutils 2.16.1.
Does it still apply here?


--
Tomasz Chmielewski
WPKG - http://wpkg.org
Software deployment with Samba