Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 8th May 2009 10:03 UTC, submitted by Joel Dahl
After having released FreeBSD 7.2 just a few days ago, the FreeBSD project now sends out a new quarterly status report, with information about development projects in progress. This report contains news on Clang replacing GCC, VirtualBox improvements, upcoming support for an NVIDIA 64-bit driver, some DTrace news, and more.
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Member since:
2006-01-24
dagw wrote:
-"Why should I as a Linux and BSD user and casual C++ developer be excited by LLVM? In what way is it better than gcc?"
Well, unlike GCC which has been around for ages, LLVM which started around 2000 is more modern in it's overall design and as such I gather it's alot easier to try out/implement different optimizations (aswell as other architectural improvements). As for the current difference between the compilers, I've done some tests using the llvm-gcc-frontend and gcc and in the last two versions I've tried (4.3-4.4 vs 2.4-2.5) gcc still generates faster code (I used some of the shootout examples: nbody, fannkuch etc and also zlib). Also, I used '-march=native -o3 -fomit-frame-pointer -mfpmath=sse -msse3' for my tests, other optimization levels/options might have rendered different results. If anyone has other tests/results/options I'm very interested!
However which one is on top in code speed at any given time is not the important thing here in my opinion, instead it is the fact that we got healthy competition in the open source compiler field. This will benefit end users of both compilers. And please let's not drag this down to licence advocacy and instead stick to the technical pro's and con's.
Edited 2009-05-08 15:44 UTC