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From: borasky@ogicse.ogi.edu (M. Edward Borasky)
Newsgroups: comp.benchmarks
Subject: Re: Anyone volunteer to do Fortran vs. C on SPECmarks?
Message-ID: <15180@ogicse.ogi.edu>
Date: 19 Dec 90 05:41:42 GMT
References: <1990Dec11.163826.5439@eagle.lerc.nasa.gov> <1990Dec15.094523.10622@groucho> <111621@convex.convex.com> <1990Dec19.032301.4449@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Organization: Oregon Graduate Institute (formerly OGC), Beaverton, OR
Lines: 35

In article <1990Dec19.032301.4449@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> gl8f@astsun8.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) writes:
>There has been an ongoing debate for umpteen years about whether
>Fortran or C is more appropriate for modern numerical programs. 
Yup

>While your choice of language is often determined by what the problem needs,
Or your employer

>So let's try to generate some proof. SPEC contains a bunch of programs
>written in Fortran which do Fortran-type things. 
I believe that some of the SPEC codes are FORTRAN and some are "C".

>Anyone volunteer to run SPEC through f2c and report times for Fortran
>and C on a variety of boxes?
Dumb idea!  There are a number of factors that need to be isolated:
1. How efficient is the "C" code that f2c produces?
2. How efficient is the machine code that the target "C" and FORTRAN
compilers produce?
3. How well-suited is the code to the architecture of the boxes in the
first place, etc.

As a first cut, the Livermore FORTRAN Kernels (LFK) benchmark is
available in both FORTRAN and C.  The C translation was hand-coded
with loving care by Greg Astfalk (then of AT&T, now of Convex.)  It is
NOT repeat NOT a coincidence that
1. The LFK benchmark is oriented to vector machines, supercomputers
and minisupercomputers.
2. At the time the conversion was done, Convex had the only WORKING
vectorizing "C" compiler.
3. The FORTRAN and "C" versions have speeds on the average and on 
individual loops that are very close to each other.

If you were to run this test on an IBM 3090VF you might see something
very different.  I would expect similar speeds (FORTRAN vs. "C") on
the LFK benchmark on RISC machines.