Re: GCC on IRIX 6.5

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat dot com>]

On Dec 15, 2000, Ramesh Babu <rbabu@kelvin.ncl.res.in> wrote:

> 	I have installed precompiled binary version of gcc from SGI. I
> found that the binaries generated by GCC almost always are 50% bigger,
> when compared to the that generated by GCC on LINUX system.

Are you talking about GNU/Linux running on mips or on x86?  If the
latter, it's not too hard to understand why binaries are a bit larger
on MIPS: MIPS is a RISC processor, with fixed-size simple
instructions, whereas x86 is a CISC processor in which common
instructions are often smaller.

Another reason why binaries may be significantly smaller is that
GNU/Linux installations often come with several GCC libraries
installed as shared libraries, but this will only happen on IRIX if
GCC is configured with --enable-shared.  Without shared libraries,
each program will get a copy of symbols it needs from the libraries,
so each program grows in size.

> Is there a way to improve gcc performance.

Do you mean making the compiler faster, or making it generate faster
code?  Both can generally be accomplished by tuning the target CPU of
GCC, or enabling certain optimizations that are not enabled by
default, but the former will require rebuilding GCC so as to apply
these optimizations onto itself.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me