Re: gcc 4.3: when will it become standard compiler?

On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 12:33:11AM +0100, Ollivier Robert wrote:
> According to O. Hartmann:
> > When will gcc 4.3 incorporated in FreeBSD 8 and become the standard
> > compiler suite? We figured out that gcc 4.3 does have a speed gain in
> > some numerical code of 3 - 8 % and I guess we can use this in the basic
> > OS as well ...
> 
> I'd rather have llvm instead...

I wouldn't mind that, either.  I've got the llvm port installed myself, in
preparation for doing some experiments of my own, but haven't tried using it to
build the kernel or user-land (or even any of the ports).  Has anyone given it a
go?  Is it missing any crucial features?  I believe that it had different (or
no?) support for PIC code generation, which could affect the ability to do
shared libraries, but recent release notes seem to indicate that that's been
addressed.

There's also someone working on a BSD-licenced retooling (ANSI/ISO-ification) of
the PCC compiler, which is getting close to being useful as a system compiler, I
believe. (http://www.ludd.ltu.se/~ragge/pcc/ in ports/lang/pcc)

In any case, performance gains on numerical code have almost zero bearing on
performance of "operating system" code -- no floating point in kernel for
starters, and hardly any time spent in loops, either...

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew