The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, October 04, 2019

It's a stupid benchmark about compiling a million lines of code, what else did I expect?

I came across a claim that the V programming langauge can compile 1.2 million lines of code per second. Then I found out that the code was pretty much just 1,200,000 calls to println('hello world'). Still, I was interested in seeing how GCC would fare. So I coded up this:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
  printf("Hello world!\n");
  /* 1,199,998 more calls to printf() */
  printf("Hello world!\n");
  return 0;
}

which ends up being 33M, and …

[spc]lucy:/tmp>time gcc h.c
gcc: Internal error: Segmentation fault (program cc1)
Please submit a full bug report.
See <URL:http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla> for instructions.

real    14m36.527s
user    0m40.282s
sys     0m17.497s
[spc]lucy:/tmp>

Fourteen minutes for GCC to figure out I didn't have enough memory on the 32-bit system to compile it (and the resulting core file exceeded physical memory by three times). I then tried on a 64-bit system with a bit more memory, and I fared a bit better:

[spc]saltmine:/tmp>time gcc h.c

real    7m37.555s
user    2m3.000s
sys     1m23.353s
[spc]saltmine:/tmp>

This time I got a 12M executable in 7½ minutes, which seems a bit long to me for such a simple (but large) program. I mean, Lua was able to compile an 83M script in 6 minutes, on the same 32-bit system as above, and that was considered a bug!

But I used GCC, which does some optimizations by default. Perhaps if I try no optimization?

[spc]saltmine:/tmp>time gcc -O0 h.c

real    7m6.939s
user    2m2.972s
sys     1m27.237s
[spc]saltmine:/tmp>

Wow. A whole 30 seconds faster. Way to go, GCC! Woot!

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