Quote:
Originally Posted by JMJ_coder
I think its awesome that they what to develop the entire toolchain to be able to (hopefully) boot GNU from the base BSD.
I read some responses on Digg (I think) that was saying that PCC wasn't very capable of creating optimized code like GCC. Does anyone know anything of this? Has the PCC team come out with any sort of benchmark comparisons?
|
Not yet as the optimization was not high on the priority list of the developers. However due to the simplicity of code it is easy to imagine that once completed the PCC compiler can be far more optimized than the GCC monster. In practical terms that means that the code compiled with PCC can be probably twice faster than the one compiled by GCC. It would be funny to see OpenBSD running faster than Linux despite heavy crypting and randomization or even better my PIII ThinkPAD running faster than my boss' DeLL under Windows XP with Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of RAM.
The advantages of PCC are numerous. It is only C compiler unlike GNU
Frankenstein. It is extremely portable. I think that it took only 2 days to
port it to i386. It is clean and simple. Originally PCC was written in late seventies by Stephen C. Johnson who was a professional mathematician and the member of legendary Bell Labs as a main C compiler for ATT Unix on PDP 11(Legendary DEC machine). It is much faster than GCC. It takes
about one third of time for PCC to compile the same code as GCC.
You will be actually able to compile Firefox in half an hour.
As BSD666Fan already mentioned that PCC is only 5MB of code while GCC is about 250MB. I can not wait for my default OpenBSD installation to slim down from 550MB to less than 300MB. If the developers of Dillo2 make serious progress (add OpenSSL support and possibly idiotic Java Script Engine) the only monster that I would have to keep would be TeX. I really wish Donald Knuth have cleaned up Troff instead of cooding
Damn Small Linux here is coming damn small OpenBSD:-)
Lately GCC started dropping support for non-Wintel architectures which did upset many old Unix guys who still want to run their Alphas, Vaxes, and other more exotic ROCK stable hardware.
This is the greatest news possibly since the release of 4.4 BSD lighte.