On 23:24 Thu 17 Jul , Adam Stylinski wrote: > There are very few pitfalls, none of which I see as real killers. > These include: > > 1.) Closed source compiler: Yes this stands against what we believe, > and yes by closing their source they're protecting the trade secrets > of their architecture. It also could be more difficult to debug, > although that's highly unlikely, they have the idb (intel debugger) > which works very much like gdb.
Doesn't really matter, although we could never move to it as the default without violating our social contract. > 2.) Linking issues: So far it's pretty versatile, but it doesn't > always cooperate with gcc compiled apps. It may be a good strategy to > make the troublesome apps which won't compile with ICC compile with > ICC. Pretty sure you didn't mean ICC twice here, but sure. > Pro's: > > 1.) Bloody fast machine code. Intel obfuscates their architecture but > they give back to the community as much as possible to make their > hardware marketable toward the open source sysadmin, developer, etc > etc. Their drivers are open and they develop for the kernel > constantly. This cooperation leads me to believe that they would > assist a team of developers in making 100% icc compatible code. OK. This involves upstream projects more than us, though. > 2.) Bloody fast compilation time. In my experience the compiler works > much faster even with heavy optimization. > > 3.) Takes full advantage of SSE enabled hardware. SIMD instructions > are quite useful, code is extremely vectorized. Sure, sure, speed is nice. > 4.) will project gentoo toward the power user more, helps the gentoo > image, and overall will make linux a more professional operating > system (and a quite competitive alternative to something like a > SPARC+Solaris configuration). I don't buy any parts of this argument, although the rest of your email is pretty good. > This would also make cluster farms and science application more > respectful toward the gentoo community. The academic and research > world already uses ICC to compile their apps for the sake of speed. > The interprocedural optimizations for both the fortran and c/c++ > compilers make it a must. Yes, ICC is nice. And people can already use it easily within Gentoo for performance-critical apps. > 5.) It's free, albeit a commercial product. As gentoo is entirely > non-profit, there is no restriction when it comes to licensing. The > binaries won't be sold for the intel-compiled livecd, and the compiler > itself with a fetch restriction allows the user to legally register > for their free non-commercial license. OK, so we can't sell icc-compiled software in our Gentoo store, so the releases would always remain built with gcc. -- Thanks, Donnie Donnie Berkholz Developer, Gentoo Linux Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com
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