There is a faster tar. It's called star. It's written by the same guy who did cdrecord, so it is, umm, how to phrase this?
Ahh. er... It has opinions. John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639 Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632 PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : [email protected] New Zealand http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf Wirth used the compiler’s self-compilation speed as a measure of the compiler’s quality. Considering that Wirth’s compilers were written in the languages they compiled, and that compilers are substantial and non-trivial pieces of software in their own right, this introduced a highly practical benchmark that directly contested a compiler's complexity against its performance. Under the self- compilation speed benchmark, only those optimizations were allowed to be incorporated into a compiler that accelerated it by so much that the intrinsic cost of the new code addition was fully compensated6
