Path: csiph.com!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder3.hal-mli.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!news.iecc.com!nerds-end From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) Newsgroups: comp.compilers Subject: Re: GCC is 25 years old today Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:02:20 GMT Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien Lines: 19 Sender: news@iecc.com Approved: comp.compilers@iecc.com Message-ID: <12-03-074@comp.compilers> References: <12-03-051@comp.compilers> <12-03-053@comp.compilers> <12-03-062@comp.compilers> NNTP-Posting-Host: news.iecc.com X-Trace: leila.iecc.com 1333225061 23550 64.57.183.58 (31 Mar 2012 20:17:41 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@iecc.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2012 20:17:41 +0000 (UTC) Keywords: GCC, history, code, comment Posted-Date: 31 Mar 2012 16:17:41 EDT X-submission-address: compilers@iecc.com X-moderator-address: compilers-request@iecc.com X-FAQ-and-archives: http://compilers.iecc.com Xref: csiph.com comp.compilers:541 Rui Maciel writes: >[I think it's fair to say that GCC was the first free compiler that >generated code competitive with commercial compilers. -John] I had an internship at HP in the late 1980s. One of the people there commented that, when gcc came out, it's code was (IIRC) 30% faster than that of HPs compilers (for the 68k-based HP9000 computers running HP/UX); a year later HPs compiler had caught up quite a bit. My guess is that HP's compiler was PCC-based, and that optimization did not play a big role in the Unix market until the arrival of RISCs and GCC. Nowadays it plays too big a role for my taste (I prefer my programs to work as intended). - anton -- M. Anton Ertl anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/ [Where are the Real Fortran programmers now that we need them? -John]