This is really interesting, thanks for doing this analysis. My interpretation is Open Watcom is about on par with Turbo C/C++. For this test, OW is 8 seconds (6%) faster on 8088, 3 seconds (11%) slower on 286, and 1 second (10%) slower on 386. Also 1 second slower on 486, but the "twice as slow" (50%) difference looks bigger because the times were so fast: 2 seconds vs 4 seconds.
It's really interesting that IA-16 GCC is so fast across all CPUs. 38 seconds (32%) faster on 8088, 12 seconds (46%) faster on 286, 5 seconds (52%) on 386, and 1 second on 486. I know this is emulated in DOSBox (not real CPU) but it's still a good comparison. It's also interesting to see the EXE size differences: IA16-GCC: 19728 Bytes (19 kiB) Watcom: 20544 Bytes (20 kiB) Turbo C++: 17510 Bytes (17 kiB) Turbo C/C++ was very good at keeping the EXE size small, but the counter is that Open Watcom meets a later C standard so probably has more in the runtime. But IA-16 GCC is also more modern, yet its EXE size is in the middle (smaller than OW). This makes me think I should build more of my FreeDOS programs using IA-16 GCC than I have been. > > Am 21.07.2026 um 19:47 schrieb Jim Hall : > > > > There's also the RUNTIME tool, included in FreeDOS in the > > "Development" package group. On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 1:57 PM Bernd Boeckmann wrote: > > Thanks, I did some more benchmarks (this time in 86box) and used RUNTIME: > > 8088 @ 4.7 MHz: > IA16-GCC: 01:19.04m > Watcom: 01:53.59m > Turbo C++: 02:01.66m > > 286 @ 6 MHz: > IA16-GCC: 00:14.00m > Watcom: 00:27.51m > Turbo C++: 00:24.49m > > 386 @ 16 MHz: > IA16-GCC: 00:05.00m > Watcom: 00:11.15m > Turbo C++: 00:10.00m > > 486DX @ 25 MHz: > IA16-GCC: 00:01.43m > Watcom: 00:03.95m > Turbo C++: 00:02.36m > > Watcom performs significantly worse than even Turbo C++ on 386 and > 486. That is not something I expected. > > Also: 286 and 386 are both ~4 times as fast per clock cycle than the > 8088, and the 486 is even ~10 times as fast per clock cycle than the > 8088, and >2 times than the 386. > _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
