Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 23:37:14 +0200 From: Hartmut Brandt <hartmut.brandt@dlr.de> To: Anders Magnusson <ragge@ludd.ltu.se> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Compiling with another compiler than gcc. Message-ID: <46EEF38A.6030304@dlr.de> In-Reply-To: <46EEE02F.10409@ludd.ltu.se> References: <46EAA12D.4090207@ludd.ltu.se> <46EEC9AB.2010805@dlr.de> <46EEE02F.10409@ludd.ltu.se>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Anders Magnusson wrote: > Hi, > > Hartmut Brandt wrote: >> Anders Magnusson wrote: >>> It is not yet bug-free, but it can compile the i386 userspace. The >>> big benefit of it >>> (apart from that it's BSD licensed, for license geeks :-) is that it >>> is fast, 5-10 times >>> faster than gcc, while still producing reasonable code. The only >> >> When reading the name pcc my first thought was: isn't that the >> compiler that was distributed on later Unix V7 tapes? And yes, the >> web-page says it is based on that one. I'm quite sure that the >> original code had no BSD copyright, so I wonder how it obtained one? >> For the rewritten code there is no question, but what for the >> remaining original code? Has it been relicensed by the original author? > Caldera released it with BSD license some 6 years ago, as part of their > "ancient unix". I've still one of these licenses that costed $100 in the beginning :-( So that looks ok. > >> It's interesting that the compiler is so much faster than gcc. I >> remember that it was around 3-5 times slower than the dmr compiler >> under V7. This tells a lot about gcc's speed :-( >> > Yes, and you are remembering correct. And yes, it says something about > gcc. > Even more interesting is that there are lots of quite slow sanity check > code in > pcc, despite that it's really fast. I suppose that the slowness when compared to Ritchie's compiler was because it was much larger (causing a lot of swapping) and it uses lex and yacc instead of hand-written parsers and lexers. Those where much slower on a PDP11. Nowadays this shouldn't make a big difference, though. The slowness of gcc comes probably from the machine-independent code representation in the backend. At least I remember a speed drop of a factor 3-4 when they inventend it going from gcc1.x to gcc2.x Nice to hear, that you're working on this! harti
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?46EEF38A.6030304>