Path: csiph.com!1.us.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!2.us.feeder.erje.net!news.glorb.com!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!news.iecc.com!.POSTED.news.iecc.com!nerds-end
From: rugxulo@gmail.com
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: Alternative C compilers on x86_64 Linux?
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2016 15:29:09 -0700 (PDT)
Organization: Compilers Central
Lines: 45
Sender: news@iecc.com
Approved: comp.compilers@iecc.com
Message-ID: <16-09-033@comp.compilers>
References: <16-09-001@comp.compilers>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Injection-Info: miucha.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="12350"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com"
Keywords: C
Posted-Date: 26 Sep 2016 21:27:18 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:1772

Hi,

On Sunday, September 4, 2016 at 2:02:33 PM UTC-5, Aharon Robbins wrote:
>
> Can I get recommendations for other (free) C compilers besides
> GCC and CLANG?
>
> In short, I'm looking for a faster compiler that actually works.

I'm not sure what miracle advice you expected to get from here.

The first thing you should do is check your build system. Maybe there
isn't much leeway there, but you should definitely something better
(simpler?) than Autotools. Try using Dash instead of Bash. Also, at
the very least, you should make your C modules as small as possible
and only use expensive optimizations on crucial files (instead of
blindly using "-O2" for everything).

If modern GCC is a bottleneck, use an older version from an old
distro (in a VM perhaps). If that isn't good advice, then try
to do rebuilds atop RAM disk (md or whatever *nix calls it).

What distro/GCC are you using anyways? Surely you've heard of
"-Og". (If you have a semi-recent Intel machine, try Clear Linux.)

Have you ever tried ccache or distcc? I haven't, but I assume that
something like that would help. I'm sure this has been attempted
before.

Honestly, I did a very naive build of Gawk myself (under old Lucid
Puppy Linux, admittedly not hosted in RAM but on hard disk). It
didn't seem that slow, but I was using "make -j4". So the obvious
question is how many cores does your cpu have? Are you using an
old laptop? Seriously, I hate advice like this, but you may honestly
get more gains from getting a newer machine with more cores. Heck,
some server machines these days have 20+ (although I admit that most
home versions don't have nearly that many).

Can't you use GNU's build server or something? Maybe I'm wrong, I
don't know the details, but I would assume they have something you
can ssh into for fast builds. Or maybe that's only for release
testing and not development?

I dunno, this kind of problem is very complex and naive at the same
time.