"The GCC team has released Version 4.3.0 of its GNU Compiler Collection. [...] The C++ standard library (libstdc++) has been given new classes for parallel data processing [...] The developers have also incorporated parts of the future ISO C++ standard..."

Last Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and then on Monday they were joined by Ubuntu 9.10 vs. Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks. One of the requests that has come up since publishing those articles are to carry out a set of tests comparing the performance of LLVM and LLVM-GCC.

"The GCC development team have announced the availability of a first release candidate for version 4.4 of their GNU Compiler Collection..."

Metadata performance is perhaps the most neglected facet of storage performance. In previous articles we've looked into how best to improve metadata performance without too much luck. Could that be a function of the benchmark? Hmmm...

The same application performs differently on different platforms. Differences include compiler brand (Microsoft Visual C++ vs gcc), compiler version (gcc 3 and 4), operating system characteristics, and file systems. These OpenOffice.org 3.0 benchmarks measure vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org on 3.0 on Microsoft Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex).

Some complain OpenOffice.org is slow and bloated. With each release there may be dozens of individual performance improvements, but there are also new features, some of which may slow things down. This the natural balance in software development, but in the end, what is the net effect on performance from one version to the next? Is it realistic to expect new features and faster performance?

"For the last two months I have been working with Mozilla on a just-in-time compiler for the JavaScript engine in Firefox, and a few hours ago this project (codenamed TraceMonkey) has landed in the main Firefox development tree. TraceMonkey is a trace-based JIT compiler and it pushes the envelope on JavaScript performance..."

We decided it was a good time to see how the server / workstation performance between this new CentOS release compares to that of Ubuntu 9.10, which was released last week, and also how it performs up against the release candidate of OpenSuSE 11.2.

California, along with Major League Baseball, is among the institutions that have a policy of “Three Strikes and You are Out.” I suggest the same rule should apply to compiler writers.