Mark Mitchell announced the availability of GCC 4.0.3. He explains, “this release is a bug-fix release for problems in GCC 4.0.2. GCC 4.0.3 contains changes to correct regressions from previous releases, but no new features.” GCC 4.0.2 was released nearly 6 months ago in September of 2005. GCC 4.1.0 was released in early March of 2006.
GCC 4.0.3 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
As a developer, I think GCC is too obsessed with code performance. I think it is already equal or better with best existing cometitors (icc, msc) except for small minority of fpu-intensive scientific apps where icc excels. What thay need to focus on IMO is compile time, which is horror and doesn’t get any better with time.
Yes, you’re right. If they increased code performance, compile time is bigger..right?
You could, you know, build without optimization. Compile goes a lot faster then.
You could, you know, build without optimization. Compile goes a lot faster then.
But it is not uncommon for weird bugs to be introduced only in optimized builds. Therefore, you usually want to test as much as possible with the same compiler settings you’ll use for the shipping product.
I am also a developer, and I have the opposite opinion that you do. For simple user apps, performance probably doesn’t matter, but when you have an application where performance matters, it *really* matters. The compilation time might need some improvement, but it isn’t that bad. If your compile times really bother you that much, maybe you need to a) check that your makefiles/buildscripts don’t recompile the whole world when you change one file b) get a faster development machine or c) look into something like distcc
The amount of time I spend waiting on compiles is trivial compared to the amount of time I have to wait for a test run of my code to complete.
You’ve got to be kidding. People have been complaining for years that GCC sucks because the code is not as fast as ICC (according to some benchmarks; some of those claims are even completely not backed up by any data), even though the difference is not noticable in 99% of the cases. And now people complain that GCC is too obsessed with performance? That just shows that people don’t know what they want.
You obviously aren’t talking about C++ performance here. It’s just now reaching decent performance compared to C. The improvements in the optimization code can now largely be shared between most of the languages GCC supports. So if you only use C then there’s not a whole lot that you’re getting out of this right now, but for the whole GCC project it means faster code for everyone, and more code coverage, i.e. fewer bugs.