New Ruby Benchmarks On GCC vs. LLVM Clang Compilers

Earlier this month were the independent benchmark results that saw Ruby built under Clang was faster than GCC when a developer running Debian was doing some basic compiler performance tests. Now another developer has done more extensive Ruby benchmarks on varying versions of GCC and Clang.

Peter Wilmott posted some benchmarks today that ran the Ruby Benchmark Suite on GCC 4.4, 4.7, 4.8 and 4.9. He also ran the same tests on LLVM Clang 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, and 3.5. Tests were done from Amazon's cloud with a m3.medium instance type.

Wilmott's benchmark results show that GCC 4.7/4.8 had close performance to Clang 3.2/3.3 and that the performance of GCC's newest stable series -- GCC 4.9 -- was noticeably faster than the other GCC and Clang versions benchmarked. For Ruby, the -O2 optimization level tended to be better too than -O3.

Full details via this blog post.