Re: optimizing compilers
Re: optimizing compilers
- Subject: Re: optimizing compilers
- From: Finlay Dobbie <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2002 19:34:21 +0000
On Friday, February 1, 2002, at 06:25 PM, Ondra Cada wrote:
Owen Anderson (OA) wrote at Fri, 1 Feb 2002 07:33:39 -0500:
OA> Many people complain that OS X feels sluggish.
OA> I believe this is primarily due to the fact that most of it was
built
OA> using GCC, which lags considerably even on it's original platform,
the
OA> x86
Sorry, but I am afraid your belief is wrong. The slowness of OSX has to
be
elsewhere (see eg. the thread of "Ways Apple COULD optimize
-setNeedsDisplay").
No, it's a combination of multiple factors. It's well known that gcc
2.95.2 sucks for PPC code generation. I think it should be better with
gcc 3.1, which Stan Shebs and the Apple compiler team are working
overtime on bringing up to scratch on Darwin/OS X. I heard a while back
that they moved a lot of their ex-MrC engineers over to work on gcc
3.1/Darwin (MrC was Apple's compiler that was part of MPW, and it was
widely recognised as being one of the most optimizing PPC compilers. see
http://developer.apple.com/tools/mpw-
tools/compilers/benchmarks/index.html for examples).
Of course, there are issues where Apple's code undoubtedly just plain
sucks.
-- Finlay