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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>I'm calling it Tilde (or TB for tilde backend) and the reasons are pretty simple, i believe it's far too slow at compiling and far too big to be fixed from the inside. It's been 20 years and cruft has built up, time for a "redo".

That put a smile on my face because I remember that was how LLVM was born out of frustration with GCC.

I dont know how the modern GCC and LLVM compares, I remember LLVM was fast but resulting binary were not as optimised, once those optimisation added it became slower. While LLVM was a wake up call to modernise GCC and make it faster. In the end competition made both a lot better.

I believe some industry ( Gaming ) used to swear by VS Studio / MS Compiler / Intel Compiler or languages that depends / prefer the Borland ( What ever they are called now ) compiler. Its been very long since I last looked I am wondering if those two are still used or have we all merged mostly into LLVM / GCC?

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It is pretty much Visual Studion on Windows and XBox, Nintendo and Sony have clang forks.

Embarcadero owns Borland, unfortunely stuff like C++ Builder doesn't seem to get much people outside big corps wanting to use it, which is a shame given its RAD capabilities and GUI design tooling for C++.

Also has a standard ABI between Delphi and C++ Builder, which allows to similar development workflows that .NET offered later with C#/VB alongside Managed C++ extensions (later replaced by C++/CLI).

Borland as of a few years ago also ships a clang fork for C++ Builder, interestingly enough. It unfortunately does not solve all of the problems you encounter using C++ Builder in the modern age.

I’ve personally watched the enshittification of too many proprietary tools to ever build something I care about on top of one today, especially something which becomes so fundamental to the design of your application like a GUI toolkit.

I know it sounds crazy, like you’d never bother forking your GUI framework anyway even when it’s open source. But I worked on an application built in C++ Builder, at a company with enough engineering talent and willpower that we would’ve forked the compiler internally to fix its problems and limitations had we been granted access to the source. Instead, I got to watch the product get held back by it year after year, hoping that Borland would care.

Yes, they do, but are still not done adding all the necessary C++ Builder sugar, that makes their tooling great, although almost there as of last year's release.

Back 20 or more years ago I used to do a lot of rec math competition programming and found that the metrowerks c++ compiler made massively faster programs than gcc, vsstudio, intel and everything else I tried then.

This seemed to be simply down to variable alignment; the programs took more memory but ran much faster, particularly multi-core (which was still high end then).

And this was on x86 where metrowerks weren't really competing, and was probably accidental. But the programs it compiled were fast.

I'd be surprised if anyone even knew that metrowerks had a c++ compiler on x86 on windows. At the time metrowerks were on the tail end of their domination of mac compilers from before mac ran on x86.

I was using Metrowerks C++ compiler suite to develop code for Dragonball (68000) embedded system 22 years ago!

Memory access patterns are everything. Memory delay is almost always the bottleneck anyway. I have the feeling that more and more this is becoming common knowledge, and techniques like "struct of arrays" are becoming more wide spread and talked about.

Is this perhaps why Build Engine used arrays, rather than arrays of struct? Organising things columnwise rather than rowwise, like an OLAP engine? https://fabiensanglard.net/duke3d/code_legacy.php

Yes. We learned that pattern in University, it is usually worth it unless in a high-level language.

Intel still has a decent use for compiling math heavy code for intel processors — so it gets a decent amount of use in HPC applications. It has some of the best vectorization passes but they only work with actual intel cpus. So it’s starting to get less traction as AMD takes the performance crown and as vectorized math moves to the gpu.

Intel's compilers are now based on LLVM too.

For large C projects, tinycc is invaluable for extremely fast, non-optimized builds. Like 10x faster than gcc or clang builds. In my case I don't wait 10m, when tcc is done with it in 3s

msvc is very much in third but it is one of the three that i think of when i think of c++ compilers

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