[fpc-devel] Comparison FPC 2.2 - Delphi 7

[Florian Klaempfl]

Marco van de Voort schrieb:
>> Op Thu, 5 Jul 2007, schreef Marco van de Voort:
>>> So we can be short about this issue: want to improve? Start measuring, the
>>> compiler is just a bloody pascal program.
>> During the 2.1 cycle, very little attention was paid to the speed of the 
>> compiler itself. This is because the compiler is fast enough for our 
>> needs.
> 
> Agree fully, but then we should communicate that, (and point people to the
> profiler) and not blame it on portability beforehand.

I profiled it some time ago and the compile time is simple spread over
the compiler. Only two procedures consumed a lot of time: fillchar and
move. I added the fastmove code at this time because we spend at least
some time in move.

In general, we loose there and there 1-2 percent and at the end we're 5
times slower. Just start with the scanner: we support macro
replacements, this requires an additional symtable look up for every
symbol. Continue with PPU loading: we check for endianess when loading,
requiring additional code. We write two or three files (.ppu, .o and .a)
instead of one. Our register allocator is more sophisticated and scales
better. We don't write the machine code directly but generate assembler
first which can be written as listing, Delphi can't. Several debugging
formats are supported, different assembler backends and so one.

None of these things is speed critical but it simply sums up.