[linux-elitists] Nobody's favorite language? C++ and free software

[Alan DuBoff]

On Tuesday 25 March 2003 22:57, Jason Spence wrote:
> Well I tried Hello World with iostreams and 'using namespace std' and
> ended up with this:

I just did a bunch of testing on a small communications app that uses 
sockets. Compiled optimized and static the resulting sizes are very close, 
with icc actually beating out by a few bytes.

$ icc -O3 -static -c ./hget.c -o ./hget
$ ls -l hget
-rw-r--r--    1 aland    aland        3422 Mar 26 00:22 hget

$ gcc-3.0 -O3 --static -c ./hget.c -o ./hget
$ ls -l hget
-rw-r--r--    1 aland    aland        3468 Mar 26 00:23 hget

Interesting to note that when I run strip on the code, I get even smaller 
code yet:

icc
-rw-r--r--    1 aland    aland        2308 Mar 26 00:27 hget
gcc-3.0
-rw-r--r--    1 aland    aland        2448 Mar 26 00:26 hget

However strip is not a part of the Intel compiler!<g> It is available for 
Linux.

> Well I haven't tried their debugger yet since their packaging is kind
> of screwy, and alien creates an idb deb which conflicts with the icc
> deb.  *shrug* Threading support otherwise has been fine from my
> perspective.

That's why I didn't want to chance using alien. I was also sent VTune 
Performance Analyzer which I haven't looked into yet. I didn't install the 
Fortran compiler as I'm not doing anything that could benifit from it.

> The vector code runs fine on my twin AMD development machines :) I
> haven't done any benchmarks on the code produced, but the faster
> compile times are well worth it.

Yes, it works fine on my dual Athlon 1800+ system.

> Although we don't see a lot of 64 bit apps really using 64 bitness on
> Solaris, I don't think that means there isn't a (future) demand for
> them on other platforms.

No, certainly not. I used it as an example because there are often reasons 
that 32 bit mode will need to be supported, i.e. the target audience doesn't 
have a lot of 64 bit hardware, code is often more bloated on a larger 
processor, etc...

I don't think Itanium is convincing people to move to 64 bit for Linux, and I 
don't think the Opteron will either, but the pricing will make it more 
compelling most likely, *IF* there is a case to be made for the performance 
gains.

-- 

Alan DuBoff
Software Orchestration, Inc.
GPG: 1024D/B7A9EBEE 5E00 57CD 5336 5E0B 288B 4126 0D49 0D99 B7A9 EBEE