[cfe-dev] Building cpp-netlib

[Dean Michael Berris]

Hi Everyone,

I've just now tested the latest clang trunk on Ubuntu Linux 10.4 and
pitted it against gcc 4.4.3 and tried building the latest in
cpp-netlib [0] master (represents the stable releasable branch) and
head-to-head clang is able to compile the template-heavy library test
suite in:

real	3m4.589s
user	2m42.898s
sys	0m8.385s

Compared to the GCC 4.4.3's performance of

real	4m51.581s
user	4m42.038s
sys	0m5.796s

That's amost a full two minutes faster!

One observation though is that clang tends to require a lot of memory
-- almost 2:1 as far as virtual memory usage compared to GCC.

I am running this test in the same VirtualBox VM running 32-bit Ubuntu
Linux 10.4 with 1024MB RAM allocated, running on a 32-bit Windows 7
host installed on a Dell Vostro 3700 (Intel Core i7).

cpp-netlib depends heavily on Boost's MPL and Boost Spirit, which
really stresses out the compilers I've been developing with. Now
though I'm happy to say I'll be using clang as the primary compiler
for development now as it catches more standards compliance issues
than the others, as well as compiles things faster.

Keep up the great work guys and I definitely hope this helps!

[0] http://github.com/mikhailberis/cpp-netlib

-- 
Dean Michael Berris
deanberris.com