mo@MESSY.BELLCORE.COM (05/10/91)
At least for SPARC machines and all the gcc versions I've seen, this statement is not true. Even before the new unbundled, more highly optimizing compilers, the gcc SPARC compiler was not as good as the standard bundled Sun C compiler over a broad set of measures, and the work done at Prisma on the bundled compiler revealed how much better the sun compiler was from a structural viewpoint, particularly for adding new kinds of optimizations and scheduling which the gcc compiler can't do because it has lost the necessary information in its internal representation. This opinion is shared by a number of people who have tried to build on gcc. NOTE, however, that when gcc first appeared for the 68K, it was a much better compiler than the Sun 68K C compiler. That is damned by faint praise, however. It wasn't very hard to do better than the old PCC compiler, and Sun never worked on that compiler, rather spending their efforts on the SPARC compiler. Maybe the new, Real Soon Now gcc will better the Sun SPARC compilers, but that is a non-trivial aim. -Mike