Re: Will Apple still support GCC development?

[Alan Lehotsky <qsmgmt at earthlink dot net>]

FYI for the application my company is developing (integer and bit-field intensive with very little floating point),
we have found gcc to be 10-30% FASTER than icc8.0.

We were told that this was partially because icc doesn't optimize unsigned expressions very well
(I'm dubious that this is the cause of the slowdown from the Intel compiler, but I have no other data besides the 9 tests (customer
code, so it's measuring what we sell) that show gcc beats icc.


-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Robert Ladd <scott.ladd@coyotegulch.com>
Sent: Jun 6, 2005 3:26 PM
To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org
Subject: Re: Will Apple still support GCC development?

Samuel Smythe wrote:
> It is well-known that Apple has been a significant provider of GCC
> enhancements. But it is also probably now well-known that they have
> opted to drop the PPC architecture in favor of an x86-based
> architecture. Will Apple continue to contribute to the PPC-related
> componentry of GCC, or will such contributions be phased out as the
> transition is made to the x86-based systems? In turn, will Apple be
> providing more x86-related contributions to GCC?

A better question might be: Has Intel provided Apple with an OS X
version of their compiler? If so (and I think it very likely), Apple may
have little incentive for supporting GCC, given how well Intel's
compilers perform.

..Scott