Return Styles: Pseud0ch, Terminal, Valhalla, NES, Geocities, Blue Moon. Entire thread

Non-sucking Win32 C compiler

Name: Anonymous 2009-08-12 14:37

I need a small (not bloated to hell, clean, not system ruining / service installing) compiler for tiny C programs with POSIX-like semantics (i.e. C library that doesn't suck and stuff like read() instead of ReadFileWEX(WHANDLE, WSHARINGMODE, WSECURITYCONTEXT, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL) - true POSIX stuff like fork() et al is not needed).

Visual Studio or cygwin are out of the question. Some GCC distro like mingw might be OK depending on how much the installation sucks (ideally there wouldn't be any installation at all).

Any ideas or do I give up to ENTERPRISE-quality software?

Name: Anonymous 2009-08-12 18:52

>>6
GCC is a piece of shit. Even most OSS projects hate it. Some big examples from the top of my head:

* ffmpeg's libavcodec H.264 decoder, despite all the assembly and GCC-catering optimizations, gets a 10% performance boost just by compiling it with ICC. ffmpeg, like a lot of other projects, has numerous workarounds for GCC bugs (code that refuses to compile depending on optimization settings, inline assembly that GCC can't manage to allocate input registers for...). The speed of the library has been regressing with basically every new GCC release, with 2.9.5 being the fastest and early 4s being the slowest (I hear that newer 4s do a bit better though)

* All of Mozilla's big projects (such as Firefox and Thunderbird) are compiled using MSVC on Windows, even though they can be compiled using GCC. Even before the builds started using PGO, GCC generated significantly worse code. Now PGO exacerbates this even more.

Also, let me remind you that MSVC does in fact support plenty of architectures. For example, Itanium, Alpha, and some PPC (the XBox360 at least) are supported. Moreover, its code generation hasn't really improved since the 6.0 release (which is over a decade old now), making GCC's suckuness even more embarrassing.

tl;dr: GCC is fine as long as you don't care at all about bloat, speed and codegen quality

Newer Posts
Don't change these.
Name: Email:
Entire Thread Thread List