On Feb 18, 2006, at 4:19 PM, Steve Baxter wrote: So this begs the question - is Apple going to look at optimising GCC for PPC? There is clearly a lot of gain to be had there! It would certainly silence a lot of GCC critics if the compile speed can be brought closer to CW.
I'm not sure how that follows: it isn't as though we haven't been speeding up gcc on PPC. gcc 4.0/Xcode 2.2 is about 15x faster than Project Builder with gcc 2.95.2 on similar hardware.
And as I mentioned, on MacBook Pro systems Xcode 2.2.1 is slightly faster than CodeWarrior Development Studio 10 in a full build of a large C++ application.
Note that gcc in and of itself is not an especially slow compiler. If you compare it to xlc, icc, or Metrowerks' mwcc for raw command-line-compilation performance, it's probably the fastest of the four. CodeWarrior, however, gets its unparalleled speed from the tight integration of the compiler with the IDE, something that Xcode and gcc are architecturally unable to do. Unfortunately, that also made CodeWarrior architecturally awkward to exploit 2- and 4-processor machines and to distribute compilations to a build farm.
But as Shawn points out this is all pretty much water under the bridge. Metrowerks stopped supporting Windows development two years ago, mothballed their Mac product last year, and now exists only as the house IDE for Freescale's embedded processors. Apple is migrating off Freescale and IBM processors onto Intel's family, and making gcc run fast and generate fast code on those is where we're focusing our energy.
Chris |