[cfe-dev] C++ Expression Template Benchmarks for GCC/Clang/Intel/PGI/MSVC

[Douglas Gregor]

On Jun 14, 2012, at 3:54 PM, Walter Landry wrote:

> Hello Everyone,
> 
> I thought you might be interested in some C++ expression template
> benchmarks I have done.
> 
>  http://www.wlandry.net/Projects/FTensor#Benchmarks
> 
> Clang's performance was mixed.  It optimized the expression template
> code just as well as the code that unrolled the expressions by hand,
> but that may be because it only did a mediocre job of optimizing the
> unrolled versions.  GCC had similar performance issues until I used
> -Ofast.  I could not find a similar option for Clang, partly because I
> could not find a complete list of Clang compiler options.  You can see
> a list of all of the compiler options that I used at

-Ofast enables unsafe optimizations that can change the results produced by floating-point operations, so it doesn't make sense to compare the code generated by one compiler using -Ofast (which gets to break the rules of floating-point math) against the code generated by another compiler that hasn't been allowed to break those rules. It's very possible that -Ofast doesn't even make sense for your library, unless you don't care about the accuracy of your results.

IIRC, Clang doesn't actually do anything with -ffast-math, either. So, an apples-to-apples comparison would not use -Ofast or -ffast-math for either. Of course, it's completely fair criticism to say that, for people who don't require exact FP math, -Ofast gives a very nice performance boost in GCC that Clang can't match.

>  http://www.wlandry.net/Projects/FTensor/compilers_2012.html
> 
> I used clang 3.0.  I also tried the 3.1 binary.  The difference in
> performance was, on the whole, not significant.


CC'ing llvm-dev, because code generation and optimization is handled by the LLVM core.

	- Doug