Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!bu-cs!xylogics!world!madd
From: madd@world.std.com (jim frost)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Request for comparisons of C compilers
Message-ID: <1989Oct22.165241.3137@world.std.com>
Date: 22 Oct 89 16:52:41 GMT
References: <3931.253b0031@uwovax.uwo.ca> <5298@ubc-cs.UUCP> <1989Oct19.014956.2682@agate.berkeley.edu> <Oct.20.18.12.58.1989.2251@math.rutgers.edu>
Reply-To: madd@world.UUCP (jim frost)
Organization: Software Tool & Die
Lines: 21

In article <Oct.20.18.12.58.1989.2251@math.rutgers.edu> bumby@math.rutgers.edu (Richard Bumby) writes:
|In article <1989Oct19.014956.2682@agate.berkeley.edu> c60c-4ab@e260-4c.berkeley.edu (Scott Drellishak) writes:
|>I would like to hear some
|> comparisons of these compilers from PEOPLE WHO HAVE USED THEM.  . . .
|
|A number of magazines do this sort of thing on a regular basis.

Yes, but be careful of which magazines.  In particular, shy away from
Byte reviews.  While I've seen good reviews from them, they seemed
heavily biased towards recommending the Microsoft C compiler even
though their benchmarks found bugs in MSC 5.0 (or 5.1, same thing),
mentioned in passing ("...loop optimization produced invalid
results..."), but generally ignored.  Personally I am distressed when
a "production" compiler produces bad code on simple benchmarks, so
this attitude surprised me.

Good luck,

jim frost
software tool & die
madd@std.com