[fpc-devel] Forwarded message about FPC status

[Sven Barth]

On 25.12.2012 12:40, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, 25 Dec 2012, Sven Barth wrote:
>
>> On 25.12.2012 12:13, Martin Schreiber wrote:
>>> On Tuesday 25 December 2012 11:20:02 Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Everybody is aware of the speed difference between Delphi and FPC.
>>>>
>>>> The compiling itself (parsing/producing assembler code) is not slow.
>>>>
>>>> >From what I remember, the problems you (and everyone else) experience
>>>>
>>>> with smartlinking and so on are largely due to the GNU linker being
>>>> slow and memory hungry.
>>>>
>>> AFAIK there are significant differences in parsing and code producing
>>> too.
>>> Last time I checked on Windows with the internal FPC linker Delphi 7
>>> compiled
>>> and linked about 10 times as fast as FPC.
>>
>> AFAIK Delphi's command line compiler does not allow you to skip the
>> assembling and linking phase, so the fairest comparison would be to
>> compare the compilation of a single unit as there the linking phase is
>> skipped. If Delphi is still better there then there are two
>> possibilities: improve the internal assembler or the parser/code
>> generator. Please keep in mind though that FPC's code generator is
>> written in such a way that the backend can be switched rather easily.
>> As we learned with the developer's blog entries about Delphi XE2 this
>> wasn't the case with Delphi XE and older. So it could be that you can
>> never reach the speed of Delphi 7's compiler as FPC is more portable.
>
> Which is why I wrote that limiting the number of CPUs/Platforms would be
> the obvious optimisation, but one which is incompatible with FPC's goals.

It would not only be limiting the amount amount of CPUs/Platforms. As 
long as at least two CPUs exist that use the compiler's current backend 
system it can't be optimized (at least not in that sense). You'd need to 
basically bring the code generator back to a pre-1.9 state to gain 
significant performance with reducing the number of target CPUs.

Regards,
Sven