
Originally Posted by
thorfdbg
Thanks for the links, I was just browsing through the C++/C optimization manual and I have to say that I disagree on the choice of the compiler for windows. I've been in image compression for years, and despite what the GNU people say, the gcc/g++ compiler performs rather poorly on the windows platform (and also on the Linux platform) as far as the optimizations are concerned. I'm very much a fan of Linux and the GNU toolchain, but the optimizer is not worth much. It has a nice list of very high-level optimization methods, but the low-level code generator stinks. In all what I've done so far, VS outperforms GNU by quite a bit. Interestingly, the latter VS versions are getting worse and worse - VS 6.0 was a very lousy compiler as far as the C++ compliance was concerned, and it also happened that it optimized your code into trash (so you always had to check), but the overall code quality was better than what I get from VS 2010. VS2005(8.0) was again worse than VS2003 (7.1). I see quite an improvement in VS as far as C++ compliance is concerned, but the code generator quality is declining - probably because it doesn't matter that much anymore for most applications.