Re: gcc 2.95 vs 3.21 performance

Timothy D. Witham
2003-02-04T23:20:27Z

If needed we could build this compiler's tree into our testing
process. (PLM/STP) So that patches or changes could be automatically
tested against a matrix of kernels, hardware configurations on
different regression and stress tests.

Tim

On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 14:11, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, John Bradford wrote:
> > > I'd love to see a small - and fast - C compiler, and I'd be willing to
> > > make kernel changes to make it work with it.
> >
> > How IA-32 centric would your prefered compiler choice be? In other
> > words, if a small and fast C compiler turns up, which lacks support
> > for some currently ported to architectures, are you likely to
> > encourage kernel changes which will make it difficult for the other
> > architectures that have to stay with GCC to keep up?
>
> I don't think being architecture-specific is necessarily a bad thing in
> compilers, although most compiler writers obviously try to avoid it.
>
> The kernel shouldn't really care: it does want to have a compiler with
> support for inline functions, but other than that it's fairly close to
> ANSI C.
>
> Yes, I know we use a _lot_ of gcc extensions (inline asms, variadic macros
> etc), but that's at least partly because there simply aren't any really
> viable alternatives to gcc, so we've had no incentives to abstract any of
> that out.
>
> So the gcc'isms aren't really fundamental per se. Although, quite frankly,
> even inline asms are pretty much a "standard" thing for any reasonable C
> compiler (since C is often used for things that really want it), and the
> main issue tends to be the exact syntax rather than anything else. So I
> don't think I'd like to use a compiler that is _so_ limited that it
> doesn't have some support for something like that. I certainly would
> refuse to use a C compiler that didn't support inline functions.
>
> Linus
>
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Timothy D. Witham - Lab Director - wookie@osdlab.org
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