Compilation Times, Binary Sizes For GCC 4.2 To GCC 4.8

Compiler benchmarks at Phoronix commonly look at the performance of resulting binaries while less of a focus is the compilation time and binary sizes. However, a developer has carried out GCC benchmarks of the compilation times and binary sizes in different scenarios for GCC releases going from GCC 4.2 to the upcoming GCC 4.8.

Steven Bosscher compared the compilation times and binary sizes of the past GCC releases and posted his results on the GCC mailing list. His key findings come down to:

- GCC 4.8 is not slower than earlier releases going back to GCC 4.2.4 for an optimized non-debug build. When using debug information, however, the compilation time rose by 17%.

- CC1 in GCC 4.8 is two times the size as it was in GCC 4.2.4. The .bss section in particular is much larger than with earlier releases of the GNU Compiler Collection.