CLANG vs GCC tests of fortran/f2c program

[Joe Gain]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 7:18 AM, Wojciech Puchar
<wojtek at wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> wrote:
>> Yes, Clang in general produces slower binaries than gcc.  Is that in
>> dispute or something?  Or is this just repetition in case we
>> didn't hear you the first time?
>
>
> just yesterday i've heard lots of otherwise claim.
>
>
>>
>> Try thinking of the transition as a step back to take many steps forward.
>
>
> What exactly step forward it means?
> For now i see ONLY politics and aggression after pointing out facts.
>
> This doesn't look like serious behaviour of serious people.
>

I think that this is a more complicated decision than just choosing the
'fastest' compiler. There are many other variables involved, and of course
the decision has a political dimension. Most things do.

Diversity and competition are nice attributes to have in a system. Having
alternatives allows users choose a compiler based on what criteria they
think are important. Users also benefit from the experience, but more
importantly, for such non-trivial projects as LLVM, different designs are
interesting in themselves. I personally, am looking forward to seeing what
the lldb debugger can do. Historically, some of the most important software
projects have been themselves disasters, but they've lead people to change
the way they think about a problem and lead to later better solutions-- for
example MULTICS ;) This is part of the development process.

And this can't just happen in a laboratory. LLVM needs projects like FreeBSD
to test it and simply be involved. I notice that bitrig, which recently
forked from OpenBSD, and which want to be a more progressive operating
system will also be swapping to LLVM and Clang. We don't know what possible
benefits there will be from the LLVM project. But there will be some.

I was a bit frustrated about being stuck with gcc4.2 for a while, and was
trying to compile as many ports as possible using gcc4.6 (FreeBSD 8.2).
There seemed to be some improvement in performance, but now I don't bother,
world is compiled with Clang and the ports are compiled with gcc4.2 and
everything works (most of the time.) I'm satisfied with performance.

I don't really understand your concerns. I mean unless you're a fairly
radical environmentalist and are really concerned about saving every
clock-cycle, running a bit slower really isn't that much of a problem most
of the time.


>
>>  Or just change your compiler.
>
> Will i be able to compile FreeBSD base system with gcc after some time?
> not sure.
>
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-- 
joe gain

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