Performance comparison to C

[Tim Prince]

Dennis Wassel wrote:

> I've used three different compilers (GCC 4.2.3, Intel 10.1 and Sun), and
> for all of them results turned out -partly largely- in favour of
> Fortran, even if I ended up doing actual and gruesome hands-on pointer
> arithmetic in C.
gfortran is stronger on optimization of f95 array assignments, while ifort
shines in optimization of f77 code.
In my opinion, low-level coding with pointers is more useful for the
purpose of raising the performance of one particular compiler/platform
combination, possibly at the expense of others.  My benchmarks with the C
syntax copied from f2c, and the C++ STL iterators, which barely disguise
the low level nature, are bad enough.  And, yes, g++ does a better job on
those than current icpc, without use of pragmas.