Am I the only one...

who thinks GCC sucks? Not the compiling engine, but the interface to it. It's made of confusing, illogical, error prone options with stupid default values, and the idea of calling everyone and their mother itself (and mix everyone's options together) is as bad as penis cancer. For example, -s is passed directly to the linker, yet -rpath isn't; -Wall and most of -Wstuff controls warnings, yet -Wl is some kind of hack to pass comma-separated arguments to the linker, especially the ones not supported by gcc; etc. Whoever did this has a disturbed mind. And I think I know who did this.

Anyways, is there a sane interface which provides completely separate, non-automagical preprocessor+compiler, assembler, and linker, with well thought out options?

>>30

I was about to mock you, but then I realized you posed your post in the form of a question and may be genuinely interested in why that approach is so flawed.

Short & Simplified version:

Different instructions take a different amount of time to process.  Differing characteristics of the internal state of the computation may affect timings as well.  It's far simpler to just run and measure than to try to work out what is happening time-wise in the chip and model it.