[gnu.gcc] Interesting data from Winter 89 Usenix paper

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