GCC 8 Through GCC 11 Stable Plus GCC 12 Compiler Benchmarks

For today's benchmarking is a look at how the GNU Compiler Collection has performed over the past few years going from the GCC 8 stable series introduced in 2018 through the recently released GCC 11.1 stable feature release plus also including the current early development snapshot of GCC 12.

Benchmarked are GCC 8.5, 9.4, 10.3, 11.1, and 12.0 (20210701). All of these compiler releases were benchmarked using the same Intel Core i9 10980XE (Cascade Lake X) system running Ubuntu 21.04 with the Linux 5.11 kernel.

Each compiler was built from source in the same (release) manner. A variety of open-source C/C++ benchmarks were then carried out each time in looking at the resulting performance while keeping to the same CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS throughout the entire duration of benchmarks. This follows our other recent GCC 11 vs. LLVM Clang 12 compiler benchmarking, tuning flag comparisons, and more. If there is enough interest similar compiler comparison tests can also be done on AArch64.