mmm, let me clarify. I currently use Apple's GCC 4.0.1 <i686-apple- darwin9-gcc-4.0.1> that works fine for macintel, 3.3 is required for decent performance on powerpc. The version that I worked with Michael on was the LLVM GCC 4.2 and or GCC 4.2. Michael I believe tried GCC 4.3 Michael said: "after managing to build the VM with the recommended setup I tried with newer GCCs (3.45 and 4.3), both significantly slower. GCC 3.45 about 50%, GCC 4.3 about 80% of GCC 2.95." With 4.0.1 the compiler optimizations tweaks in the macintosh carbon VM build give it a good 10%? better than the defaults optimizations. However that presupposes -mtune=prescott -march=pentium-m which one can get away with on the macintosh platform, versus the bazillion cpu choices & clones on the Wintel side. On 30-Jan-09, at 9:37 AM, Andreas Raab wrote:

John M McIntosh wrote:

...

Yes, I can't recall it was what 50% of the performance of a 3.x compile out of the box, and after *much* tweaking of compiler flags it was mmm just 20% slower.. Well certainly the performance impact was measured in 10 of percent.

So what do you use today? gcc 4? And how does it stack up performance-wise against a Windows VM on the same box? I personally wouldn't mind moving forward but the results in the past were so godawful that I haven't tried in a long time.

Cheers, - Andreas

...

On 30-Jan-09, at 4:33 AM, Michael Rueger wrote:

...

John McIntosh and I actually spent some time a few ago compiling VMs on Windows and MacOS with the newest GCCs and ran into a bunch of problems, especially concerning performance. I had to put the work on the back burner for now, but switching to newer compilers will take a bit of extra work at some point.

Michael

-- = = = = = = ===================================================================== John M. McIntosh <johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com> Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com = = = = = = =====================================================================

-- = = = ======================================================================== John M. McIntosh <johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com> Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com = = = ========================================================================