> Since many of us on the list are programmers of one sort or another and
> interested in numerical analysis also of one sort or another,
> maybe someone
> would care to offer an opinion as to which is the better C++
> compiler in the
> Windows environment these days and why.
Back in my pre-hacking <grin> programming days, I did a variety of
benchmarking with various C++ compilers. I found that GNU's C++ did a
fantastic job of optimizing the code for speed. The current generation of
Visual C (whatever version it was) and Borland's C, and a couple others I
forgot the names of, were all tested by compiling the same code, which was a
compute intensive program of some sort or other, and then compared for speed
of execution as well as size of compiled code.
Gnu's compiler topped the speed list by a good 5-10% from the second place
compiler, with a marginal increase in the size of the code. It had some
nice things where it would expand some loops and optimize for 32bit code.
I'm sure that nowadays, the results would be different since compilers can
do a lot to optimize the use of Pentium style instructions, making sure the
pipeline is always full, etc.
Anyone have any current results along those lines?
