GNU c++ bashing (was Re: c++ vs ada results)

[David Hinds]

In article <32088 at dime.cs.umass.edu> eli at smectos.CS.UMASS.EDU (Eli Brandt) writes:
>GCC sidenote:  It appears that gcc -O generates division code which is about
>six times faster than SGI's cc -O on a 4D.  Multiplication is "only" 70%
>faster.  Has anybody else seen numbers like these?  A factor of six seems
>just a bit odd.

What code, exactly, shows this big difference?  It is not believable that
two reasonable decent compilers should show a large difference in generated
code to do a single primitive operation.  Does the difference persist at
-O3 with the MIPS compiler?  It is not completely fair to compare GCC full
optimization with the first level of MIPS optimization.  I was especially
surprised to see this claim, because in my experience, GCC -O3 code is
15-25% slower than than MIPS cc -float -O3 code on my applications.  I
occasionally use GCC to help trace down bugs, because I can get more
warning messages, but I always use the MIPS compiler for compute-intensive
code.  

 -David Hinds
  dhinds at cb-iris.stanford.edu