Re: Sun compares their compiler tools to GNU tools

[Gerald Pfeifer <pfeifer at dbai dot tuwien dot ac dot at>]

David Miller already responded in quite some detail (Thanks!), so I'm
only adding some 0.2 Schilling.

On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, Mike Stump wrote:
>> Shall we add some official reply from EGCS developers and testers) to
>> our web page?
> If we can't say we're better now, what point is it?

First of all, we *are* better now! egcs-1.1 and egcs-mainline generate
more efficient code than egcs-1.0.3 and gcc 2.7, at least for those
experiments that I have conducted.

Then, there is more than benchmark data. Sun claims that their environment
allow for faster development, ignoring free Tools like DDD for example
(http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/softech/ddd/).

Then, there is cross-platform availability, something which Sun cannot
offer (except for x86 Solaris).


> 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?

The third-party benchmarks from Vividata are not reproducable, which
means that they are absolutely not scientifically founded.  (And yes,
I am in that business.)

I am sure one can up with a special benchmark for any compiler, where
this very compiler is twice as fast as any other compiler. (Cf. what
Sun has done when ``improving'' there Java benchmark performance.)

Gerald
-- 
Gerald Pfeifer (Jerry)      Vienna University of Technology
pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at   http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/~pfeifer/