GCC 3.0 generates great code on x86.

[Brad Lucier]

> i never really bothered with gcc3.0 to much, it ran pretty slow,

3.0 has been given a bad rap in a lot of places.

Today I finally tested it on i686-unknown-linux.gnu by computing
3 ^ 1000000 (that's 3 to the millionth power) on my bignum arithmetic
package.  Using previous versions of the compiler (including RedHat
2.96) the fastest I could get it to go was 2.5 seconds.  Today it
ran in 1.5 seconds after being compiled with gcc-3.0.  This is on
my lowly 350 MHz PII.

There may be problems with this compiler, but there are also some
*great* things about it.

Brad Lucier