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From: swalton@well.UUCP (Stephen R. Walton)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: C compiler comparison
Message-ID: <1890@well.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-Oct-86 04:32:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: well.1890
Posted: Tue Oct  7 04:32:46 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Oct-86 00:52:44 EDT
References: <8610050658.AA12992@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: swalton@well.UUCP (Stephen R. Walton)
Distribution: net
Organization: Whole Earth Lectronic Link, Sausalito CA
Lines: 52
Keywords: C compilers manx aztec
Summary: A few Manx questions answered

In article <8610050658.AA12992@cory.Berkeley.EDU> dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) writes:
> (...a fairly accurate Manx vs. Lattice comparison omitted, then)
>
>
>Points of NO INFORMATION: (that I do not have any info on)
>	-Does Manx directly support the FFP library?

   Yes.  As a result, Manx is nearly 10 times faster than Lattice on
floating point calculations.

>	-Is the Manx compiler one pass or two? executable size?

    The compiler is two pass;  the second pass is an assembler which takes
most (all,in the new release) of the constructs accepted by the Metacomco
assembler.  Executables, even with int=32 bits, are always significantly
smaller.

>	-how large is a symbol table dump compared to the size of
>	 The #include files dumped?
>
    They're fairly large, but they load MUCH faster than the #include files.
>	-do utilities exist in PD to convert standard libraries/object
>	 modules to Manx and back?
    For the reasons Jim Goodnow gave, a standard -> Manx converter is easy,
but a Manx -> standard converter is not.  There is no PD converter;  one
comes with the commercial Aztec package.  Jim also promises that the new
version of Manx (now shipping) will have a linker which will read standard
object files.
>	-has anyone done any speed tests Lattice vs Manx which DO NOT
>	 include the time it takes to load the executables? (this is
>	 for compilation).  Also, don't include manx's ability to load
>	 symbol table dumps.. What I'm interested in is a comparison
>	 of actual compilation speeds.
      Do you have any suggestions on how to do this?  Also, it seems a bit
unfair to exclude executable size and Manx's table dump capability.  When
benchmarking two compilers, only one of which optimizes, we don't turn
off the optimizer to get a "fair" comparison.  I'd do the test, but I
can't fit Lattice into RAM: :-)
>I agree that Lattice has a bit of catching up to do in terms of speed,
>but think that Manx is off track by going off standard.
>
>					-Matt
     One further note:  I compiled Matt's original Shell program with Manx.
I added some #define's in shell.h to get rid of most of his xstdio routines
so that the only routine I needed from MY.LIB was xprintf, and that only to
get fprintf() to an AmigaDOS file handle.  (Memory allocated with malloc()
with Manx is automatically free()'d upon return from main() or upon a call
to exit()).  The resulting executable was 23K plus a bit long.  I believe
this compares favorably to what Matt gets with Lattice and MY.LIB.  One has
to wonder about a company whose library can be bettered by one guy working
in his spare time...
					Steve Walton, representing myself