[Python-Dev] Compiling Python with Intel compiler?

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Intel has a free (as in beer) C compiler for Linux. A friend of mine
> is involved in its production and marketing. He would like to see how
> "his" compiler does on Python -- does it work at all, and is there a
> speedup?

There is a bug report on this compiler: python.org/sf/1162001
There is also a patch, python.org/sf/1162023 which works around
the bug. I don't like the work-around, because it assumes that the
compiler binary is called "icc", however, it might be called just
"cc" on some installations.

With that issue resolved, the compiler apparently can build Python.
However, the resulting interpreter doesn't work for some people:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-March/270672.html

This issue apparently only exists if you use both -O3 and -xN;
if you omit one of them, it builds fine. I suspect a compiler
bug.

As for performance, Perky compared ICC (unspecified version) with
gcc 2.95 on FreeBSD 4.5:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/sol.lists.freebsd.ports/msg/90a736b7097d9b05

At that point, the then-current version of ICC produced faster code
than the then-current version of gcc (this was in 2002).

In Dec 2004, Mark Asbach did the same thing with ICC 8 vs. gcc 3.3.4,
on Linux:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/a4af997f8f95592e?hl=en

He reported a small speedup.

I couldn't find anything on Python and ICC V9.

Regards,
Martin