tower@WHEATIES.AI.MIT.EDU (Leonard H. Tower Jr.) (02/09/89)
GCC was one of several compilers used in "A Comparison of Compiler Utilization of Instruction Set Architectures" by Daniel V. Klein of CMU's Software Engineering Institute. He gathered data by selecting a set of 8 large Unix programs and libraries that had a broad range of functionality. GCC 1.30 was used on the Motorola 88100 and Sun SPARC, and as advertised was still buggy (i.e. dumped core) on those architectures (though the output was still useful for the study). GCC 1.31 was used on the Motorola 68020 as was the SunOS 3.5 cc. Dan found that GCC produced fewer instructions (84751 to 89335) and fewer bytes of executable (248828 to 337024) than SunOS 3.5 cc. Dan plans to continue the study and produce an SEI technical report later this year. enjoy -len