[ltp] Intel compiler

[Tod Harter]

On Friday 19 April 2002 05:34, you wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 12:59:25PM -0400, Dean L. Hedin wrote:
> > > I read that the recently
> > > released Intel C++ compiler produces code that is 300% faster on the
> > > average. Unfortunately, the shared libraries compiled with the Intel
> > > compiler won't work with executables compiled with GCC. You must
> > > recompile your whole C++ stuff to use it, which is hard since there are
> > > source code incompatibilties between GCC and Intel C++. So you can only
> > > dream of a KDE that is three times faster. :-)
> >
> > I wonder if there are any efforts underway to make an entire distro based
> > off of the new Intel compiler.   I understand the same incompatabilities
> > between the Intel compiler and gcc also prevent builing a linux kernel
> > with it.
>
> Is the Intel compiler open source?
> I wouldn't be interested, if not.

I believe it is free, but I don't think it is "open source". As I recall the 
rules are you can't distribute it, and you can't modify it. In the "old days" 
most chip and O/S vendors supplied a C compiler under the same sort of 
arrangement, free but non-redistributeable. Its really intended as a way of 
making sure there is SOME way to compile stuff on your architecture. Now that 
GCC is ubiquitous most vendors have stopped bothering. Basically Intel's 
reasoning for making their own compiler is that there are some chips which 
GCC doesn't support well enough and they wanted to be able to show off 
advanced features of the IA32 and IA64 architectures that GCC didn't 
adequately support.

I think its real driving force is the i960 series chips. They're built for 
high performance embedded applications and having a compiler like GCC that 
generates crappy code is just not acceptable to users of a chip like that.

Personally I think the open source community would be very well served to 
focus the main effort of development on a GCC upgrade/replacement since it 
would greatly benefit ALL OSS projects. 

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