[LLVMdev] Benchmarks

[Chris Lattner]

On Fri, 30 Apr 2004, Reid Spencer wrote:

> There's been some recent discussion on the list about benchmarks. I just
> read a Dr. Dobbs article on the relative runtime performance of various
> compilers (8 of them compared) on Intel platforms. The test focused on
> mainly template type things but offers Dhrystone and zlib for
> comparisons.

Interesting, I'll definitely take a look.  LLVM should do fairly well on
the tests I would guess.

> I am, of course, curious how LLVM stacks up in both native code
> generation and the CBE. I guess the main point is that GCC is not the
> compiler to beat, Intel 8.0 is (at least for the template based tests
> this benchmark was aimed at).

Yes, definitely.  GCC is not the end-goal, and for that matter, neither is
ICC. :)

> Any chance we can get this test suite included in the benchmark?

There is a chance, but as Vikram mentioned, it's not extremely likely to
happen in the immediate future.  However, if you or someone else wrote the
makefiles neccesary to the suite to the llvm/test/Programs hierarchy, we
would be happy to add them and have our automated testers run them.  :)

In particular, I'd really like to try to foster some more community
involvement in all aspects of LLVM, including coding, porting, testing,
documentation, performance tweaking, ...  Our group obviously has a lot
invested in LLVM and we will continue doing lots of interesting things,
but unfortunately we do have limited people-bandwidth.  If you *really*
want something done (like any open source project), the best way is to do
it yourself of convince someone to do it for you.

I'm not try to complain here: we have had a number of high-quality
contributions from several different people, I just wanted to point out
that asking us to do something isn't the only way to get it done.  :-)

-Chris

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