Built for speed (original) (raw)

A lot of those lines are empty, but only because the preprocessor (which represents the first stage of the compilation process) included header files, stripped comments, replaced macros etc. And generally, due to some "special" features of C++ (template metaprogramming, scoping rules such as ADL, ...), C++ compilers usually perform much worse than C compilers. (You should watch BCC compile plain C code. Don't have much of that myself though.)

BCC is probably the fastest C++ compiler; IME, VC is a bit slower, GCC is significantly slower, and massively optimizing compilers (such as ICC) are slower by at least one magnitude. Conversely, DCC isn't really that fast because it uses almost-linear lookup algorithms in many places where it shouldn't (read Barry's comment on http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/hundred\_thousand\_lines\_unit.html). Most "modern" compilers /should/ be able to perform better than that.

Oh, and did I mention I can easily parallelize the compilation of my C++ code and run four instances of BCC on my quad-core machine? Try that with Delphi :)

(FTR, above numbers were measured on a single core.)