LLVM Clang 16 vs. GCC 13 Compiler Performance On Intel Raptor Lake

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LLVM Clang 16 vs. GCC 13 Compiler Performance On Intel Raptor Lake

For those wondering how the recent releases of the Clang 16 and GCC 13 are competing for the fastest generated binaries of these leading open-source compilers, here is a fresh round of benchmarks from an Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" system looking at the performance for a variety of C/C++ workloads built under each of these compilers.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/gcc13-clang16-raptorlake

[paulpach]

Wow, Clang has come a long way. Just a couple of years ago Clang was decimated in some of these benchmarks.
👏👏👏

[patrick1946]

Wow, Clang has come a long way. Just a couple of years ago Clang was decimated in some of these benchmarks.
👏👏👏

Yes but the quality of the compiler and libC++ is getting worse. Modern C++ support too. You can clearly see that Apple and Google are not anymore investing.

[Alliancemd]

Alright! LLVM/Clang always had a better architecture, better heuristics and license but the argument for GCC was that it generates better code, now it seems that Clang is just better from most points of view.

[mahlersand]

How do these results compare to the current states of both compilers? Because I imagine to recall that about a year ago GCC was slightly faster, but had lost some performance when compared to even earlier versions. Has Clang improved performance or has GCC lost more performance to achieve this result?

[junkbustr]

Appreciate your work as always to keep us current on the state of the art.

Just curious - how do these results compare to the preceding versions? I'm not interested in going from GCC 12 to 13 or LLVM if there is no performance benefit.

[anarki2]

Yes but the quality of the compiler and libC++ is getting worse. Modern C++ support too. You can clearly see that Apple and Google are not anymore investing.

And you base those statements on... ?

[Setif]

Yes but the quality of the compiler and libC++ is getting worse. Modern C++ support too.

Could you show proof of that.

You can clearly see that Apple and Google are not anymore investing.

No, I don't see that. They still contribute to LLVM with many other organizations Intel, AMD, Nvidia
I see the opposite many commercial organizations are investing on LLVM because of its license.

GCC doesn't have equivalent to Clangd which is used by many tools, their static analyzer still doesn't support C++.
In general GCC has bad support for Tooling. Almost every tool I know uses LLVM/Clang backend.

[patrick1946]

And you base those statements on... ?

On working with all three compilers daily.

[patrick1946]

Could you show proof of that.

No, I don't see that. They still contribute to LLVM with many other organizations Intel, AMD, Nvidia
I see the opposite many commercial organizations are investing on LLVM because of its license.

GCC doesn't have equivalent to Clangd which is used by many tools, their static analyzer still doesn't support C++.
In general GCC has bad support for Tooling. Almost every tool I know uses LLVM/Clang backend.

LLVM is not Clang, it's the base for Clang and other compilers like Swift, Rust etc..

I worked on Clang tooling, so I could see the engagement of Google. Why do you think Clang was falling behind GCC?

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support#cpp20

Look at modules or coroutines, they are still not finished. Clang was for a time the best compiler but in the last time it shows quality issues. It has little glitches but they are annoying. MSVC actually got much better. GCC stayed steady. But that is only my personal expirience as a C++ developer.