[Proj] Geo Transfoms and calculations

[strebe]

Not to start a war, but GCC is not quite "world class". It is usable, but the code generation from MS Visual Studio C++ is much better. Intel also supplies their own compiler so that developers have access to world-class code generation; I have read it's even better than Microsoft's but have not used it myself, though I am considering it for Macintosh.

How do I know this? The disinterested benchmarks say so. Not content to take others' word for it, my own software Geocart runs nearly twice as fast on VS C++ -generated code than on GCC-generated code in compute-bound situations. That's... important, when I have massive raster reprojections that take minutes or even hours.

GCC's conformance to C++ standards used to be MUCH better than VS C++, but that advantage has dwindled since VS C++ 7 and pretty much disappeared in VSC++ 8, which I have on occasion found to be even more conformant than GCC. VS C++ 6 was a standards disaster.
<<< shudder >>>

So, I would agree GCC is world-class for standards conformance, which is important. The same cannot be said for code generation, which is also important. Since the best performers in that regard come out of proprietary vendors, I have to view "the world-class status of both Linux and GCC is a result, largely, of their GPL status" to be more ideological than a factual, particularly since there are not many metrics the market cares about by which Linux leads the world. Still, I am grateful to have the GPL, and I agree it makes no sense to fault the GPL community for the license or its implications. Fair's fair, and it's not like developers would be better off if GPL did not exist.

Regards,
— daan Strebe


On Jan 2, 2009, at 8:41:35 AM, "Charles Karney" <ckarney at sarnoff.com> wrote:
(1) I question whether the "good ol' days" were really that good.  Back
in the 1970's, you weren't sitting in your "cozy den" hacking on cheap
hardware with a free world-class OS (Linux) and a free world-class
compiler (GCC).  (And the world-class status of both Linux and GCC is a
result, largely, of their GPL status.)

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