GCC 14 vs. LLVM Clang 18 Compiler Performance On Fedora 40

One of the leading-edge benefits of Fedora Linux is that it always ships with the most up-to-date open-source compiler toolchains at release. For their spring releases each year, it typically means shipping with a GCC compiler that isn't even officially released as stable yet. With this week's release of Fedora 40, it's shipping with GCC 14.0.1 as the development version that will culminate with the inaugural GCC 14 stable release in the coming weeks. Plus Fedora 40 has all of the other latest GNU toolchain components and then over on the LLVM side is with the current LLVM 18 stable series. For those curious how GCC 14 vs. LLVM Clang 18 performance is looking, here is a wide range of C/C++ benchmarks carried out on Fedora Workstation 40 using a System76 Thelio Major workstation powered by the Zen 4 AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X.

For our first look at the GCC 14 vs. Clang 18 compiler performance, I ran more than 120 benchmarks this week looking at how the 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 7980X is performing for each of these compilers as shipped by Fedora 40 and maintaining the same CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS throughout.

It's quite a straight-forward look in seeing how the GCC vs. Clang x86_64 performance is competing with these new 2024 versions. For those that haven't looked at GCC vs. Clang benchmarks in recent years, it's very competitive on the x86_64 side and on AArch64 there are a number of areas where Clang leads.

When the GCC 14.1 stable release is out I'll be following up with a more diverse range of CPUs and benchmarks being carried out for these latest open-source compilers. For now is the Fedora 40 look at GCC 14 vs. Clang 18 on AMD Zen 4 as a preview.