Compiler Benchmarks Of GCC, LLVM-GCC, DragonEgg, Clang

Continuing with the molecular biology theme, LLVM's generators and optimizers again struggled compared to the mature GCC. When looking at HMMer performance across GCC versions, there is a major improvement in performance between GCC 4.2 and GCC 4.3, while the performance in GCC 4.4/4.5/4.6 is virtually the same as in GCC 4.3. When switching over to the compilers leveraging LLVM, their performance had dropped compared to the recent GCC releases and is running at around the speed of GCC 4.2.1.

GCC 4.5.0 came out to win the 7-Zip compression benchmark while using GCC 4.5 with DragonEgg did the worst. Clang and LLVM-GCC had not worked with 7-Zip.

GCC again carried the lead over LLVM when it came to the LAME MP3 encoding performance. On all three systems, LLVM's Clang compiler was the slowest and just in front of that was LLVM-GCC. GCC with DragonEgg could not build LAME 3.98.2.