Re: [9fans] GUI toolkit for Plan 9

["rob pike" <rob@plan9.bell-labs.com>]

> I thought he meant the way it vastly outperformed puny little toy
> compilers like the one in Plan 9.

I've heard this before.  People talk about GCC as though it's fast and
generates particularly efficient code.  Neither of these appears to be
true, at least as of a couple of years ago.  I was teaching a course
and, requiring ANSI C, made the students use the commercial SUN C
compiler instead of GCC. (GCC isn't strict or accurate about ANSI no
matter how many flags you turn on.)  I heard a lot of complaints from
the students that GCC was better so we did a shootout.  The SUN
compiler ran several times faster and the code it produced ran about
10%-40% faster on a variety of benchmarks.  This, of course, was on
the SPARC.

Much longer ago, we did a similar shootout with Plan 9's compiler
against GCC on the MIPS, with similar results, but I hear GCC has
improved somewhat on that architecture.

I just did a sloppy compile-time test of Plan 9's 8c against GCC on a
386 and see that 8c runs dramatically faster.  I don't dispute that
GCC could be generating better code, however; I didn't test that and
8c isn't particularly good.  For me, though, compile time matters more
than quality of code, as long as the code is reasonable.

In summary, GCC is reliable, may generate good code (although there's
evidence it's not stellar), but is slow to compile.  Please define
'outperform'.  I won't dispute 'puny' for the Plan 9 compiler,
although I think 'toy' is unwarranted.

-rob