MinGW and Python

[Alex Martelli]

sturlamolden <sturlamolden at yahoo.no> wrote:

> Robert Kern wrote:
> 
> > - gcc does not optimize particularly well.
> 
> That is beyond BS. The more recent gcc releases optimize as well as any
> commercial compiler. GCC 4 may even optimize better than MSVC.
> 
> GCC is the compiler used to build the Linux kernel and MacOSX. If it
> can deal with this I say it can handle Python as well. My guess is you
> will not notice any performance difference for the Python interpreter.

That is quite possible, of course: if, for example, the 14% speed
difference I measured with pybench is representative, then you might not
notice it because human beings have a hard time noticing time
differences of that magnitude.  But it might still be there, easy to
measure, even though not to notice.

At the same time, if the 14% slowdown is representative, then it's not
true that the compiler responsible for it "optimizes as well" as the
other; indeed, "does not optimize particularly well", under such a
hypothesis, would be far from a "beyond BS" assertion.


Alex