Ruby Compiled With Clang Is Noticeably Faster Than GCC

While in our benchmark runs the performance of generated binaries between GCC and LLVM's Clang C/C++ compilers are generally quite close, there are exceptions. When it comes to real-world usage of Clang, most companies tend to just utilize Clang for now when producing debug builds due to its faster compile times and better diagnostics than GCC, but GCC still ends up getting used for producing release/production builds.

Recently, Google switched to Clang for production builds of their Chrome web browser. As more good news for the future of Clang, it seems that Ruby when built under Clang is measurably faster than GCC.

Bráulio Bhavamitra shared that Ruby compiled with Clang 3.5 is 8% faster than GCC 4.9. However, more impressive is that the lead jumps to 44% faster when Clang 3.5 is compared to GCC 4.7.2 as packaged in Debian 7 Wheezy. Details on this Ruby performance accomplishment for Clang can be found via this blog post.