Reviews
 

I published my first compiler comparison back in 1988, for the now-defunct magazine MicroCornucopia; in the early '90s, I wrote many a compiler comparison and product review for Computer Language, Dr. Dobb's and other journals. The heyday of programming magazines is long past, and the realm of product reviews has moved to the Internet -- hence, these pages.

GCC 4.0: A Review

2 May 2005

If any one piece of software is the foundation of Free Software, it is the GNU Compiler Collection. The release of version 4.0 in mid-April brings many changes and new features. I compare the new 4.0 with 3.4.3 on a variety of real world applications in C and C++, see how the compiler performs on the Linux kernel, and take a preliminary look at the new Fortran 95 compiler.

Benchmarking Linux C and C++ Compilers

18 September 2004

An ongoing series of articles that track the quality of programming tools for Linux, including Opteron and Pentium 4 tests for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and Intel C++.

Creating Corwin: Building a Dual_Processor Opteron System

3 April 2004

I talk about buying and building my new dual-Opteron workstation, dubbed "Corwin". Among the topics: problems encountered while putting the system together, and my impressions of both the Opteron processor and Gentoo's AMD 64 Linux distribution.

Linux Number Crunching: Benchmarking Compilers and Languages for ia32

18 May 2003

I implemented a celestial alamanac algorithm in Java, C++, and Fortran 95, comparing performance of different programming languages and compilers for Pentium 4 hardware.