Early GCC 7 Compiler Benchmarks On Linux: Some Performance Improvements

[Cape]

Wow! People are still talking about Clang? That's a dead project already! Move on guys...

[microcode]

Wow, weird politics going on here. You do know that gcc and clang developers are pretty much all friends? clang enjoyed the benefit of being able to start from scratch with a new architecture, so the internal design is much better. The gcc folks want to get there, but they have the much bigger problem of requiring huge legacy compatibility, so they move more slowly with refactoring. It's impossible to share code because of the license incompatibility, but everyone is talking and sharing ideas.

For what it's worth, Clang is committed to (meaningful) compatibility with GCC, including many GNU C and GNU C++ extensions; so it is a cost that both of them bear to an extent.

[cb88]

Why is clang a dead project?

It isn't!!? If anything... gcc was dying when clang/llvm was created the superior ability to work with the community on clangs side as well providing gcc with competition in the open source world has kicked gcc development in the butt a bit.

[carewolf]

I hope besides all the performance that this will result in completed compilation of code and binaries that do not exhibit strange runtime problems. It might have a reason that Gentoo dev team takes some time to declare new compilers as "stable".

Well that is the problem with optimizations. If programmers are relying illegal or undefined behaviour they might end up with things that doesn't compile or just crash. As we saw with GCC 6, sometimes people writing highly complex low-level code like V8 break the C++ rules, and the compiler comes back and bites then in the next upgrade.

[zboson]

GCC and Clang are both great compilers and I hope they both are successful. I prefer both of them to MSVC or ICC. Clang often produces more intriguing machine code but in practice the performance differences are not significant enough for me to prefer one. GCC has better OpenMP support so that's an advantage for me.