[csw-maintainers] Solaris Studio vs GCC

[Mark Phillips]

On 11 Mar 2012, at 23:21, Peter Bonivart wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 11:48 PM, Ben Walton <bwalton at opencsw.org> wrote:
>> I understand that performance of the binaries generated by studio used
>> to be superior, but I don't know if that's still the case.  Aside from
>> this (possible) win for studio, what are some of the other reasons
>> we've traditionally preferred it to gcc?
> 
> I'd like to switch the _default_ compiler only. :)
> 
> Today quite some packages are built with gcc anyway due to being too
> hard to build with Studio. If someone feels that Studio will give them
> faster binaries they can still use it. I would like to see some actual
> numbers though for the sake of the discussion. James Lee used to
> provide some back in the day.

I've always wondered why we've never done any tests to prove one way or
the other. It seems we've dogmatically followed the wisdom that Studio produces
faster binaries. I'm sure that was the case, but I'd like to see if it's still *that* 
significant these days.

It would make life a lot easier if we were using GCC for sure.