Re: gcc 2.95 vs 3.21 performance

Linus Torvalds
2003-02-05T19:02:54Z

In article <3E4045D1.4010704@rogers.com>,
Jeff Muizelaar <muizelaar@rogers.com> wrote:
>
>There is also tcc (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/tcc/)
>It claims to support gcc-like inline assembler, appears to be much
>smaller and faster than gcc. Plus it is GPL so the liscense isn't a
>problem either.
>Though, I am not really sure of the quality of code generated or of how
>mature it is.

tcc is interesting. The code generation is pretty simplistic (read:
trivially horrible for most things), but it sure is fast and small. And
judging by the changelog, Fabrice is trying to compile the kernel with
it.

For a lot of problems, small-and-fast is good. Hell, some of the things
I'd personally find interesting don't have any code generation part at
all (static analysis of annotated source-code - stanford checker on the
cheap). And development doesn't always need good code generation (right
now some people use "gcc -O0" for that, because anything else hurts too
much. Now, the code from tcc will probably look more like "-O-1", but
at least you can test out things _quickly_).

Linus