2010 is the first year when I started comparison of GCC and LLVM compilers. LLVM is becoming a popular compiler especially for development because its learning curve is lower than GCC one.

I am focused mostly on the compiler comparison as optimizing compilers on major platform x86/x86-64. I don't consider other aspects of the compilers as quality of debug information, supported languages, standards and extensions (e.g. OMP), supported targets and ABI, support of just-in-time compilation etc.

I use SPEC CPU2000 benchmark because more modern SPEC CPU2006 for set of options I try still requires a lot of CPU time (weeks) even on fastest computers. I could say a lot about the evil of benchmarking but SPEC CPU benchmarks (spec.org) are de-facto standard benchmarks for compilers.

Last modified: 09/06/2011 - vmakarov at redhat dot com

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