Re: Sun compares their compiler tools to GNU tools

["David S. Miller" <davem at dm dot cobaltmicro dot com>]

   Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:04:00 -0800
   From: mrs@wrs.com (Mike Stump)

   > BTW, the page at the URL above is ridiculous,

   No, it is not.  It is perfectly reasonable and valid.

It lacks internal consistency at least.  They say they use egcs as
their example of the latest and greatest, in this document, and then
they proceed to use gcc-2.7.2 for one of the primary benchmarks.

I think using a 4 year old example of gcc's optimization technology
is nothing short of rediculious.

Next, they pass off all of gdb's features, and for one that graphical
GUI's are available for it and run just fine.  The impression left by
this memo is that it is command line only.  This simply is not true.

   It looked detailed enough for me.  Maybe you don't play in the
   benchmark circles?  Maybe you can back up your statement better.  What
   detail did you miss?  Did you follow the link and read the whole
   thing, or just the 2 paragraphs?

Maybe you did not read it Mike.  Consider that in Appendix B they
don't even list the GCC spec run detailed listings, or have I missed
it?  If I have, please show me where in the document it is.  As far as
I am concerned, as far as detail goes, this memo was completely
lacking.  It's a marketing prop, nothing more, and it was designed and
played out as one.

   >  . What's ``the latest from GNU''

   What part of ``egcs-2.90.23 980102 (egcs-1.0.1 release)'' was unclear
   to you?

Correct, but latest GNU is not gcc-2.7.2

   >  . Customer application (C code)  7%-30%
   >    No source code available?

   You seem to know know or understand specint or benchmarking, please
   read comp.benchmarks for a year.

This may be how things are done, but it still does not mean that using
such tactics is utter crap.  One nice thing for vendors and these
sorts of benchmarks is that nobody can then refute their claims.  Open
benchmarks would kill this problem.  And thats the sort of thing the
EGCS project should use, so people could easily check up on any claims
that we make about gcc.

Later,
David S. Miller
davem@dm.cobaltmicro.com