The consequence of increasing expressivity is an increased burden on the compiler to produce good assembly code from the complex high-level constructs written by the programmers. Human-readable, expressive languages enable bug-free, maintainable code and are here to stay. The Python programming language is popular because of its readability and expressiveness, even at the cost of reduced runtime speed. Modern standards of the C++ language are moving in the direction of greater expressivity and abstraction. Newer language standards place greater emphasis on constructs that allow programmers the ability to express their intent. However, workloads with complex memory access patterns and non-standard kernels require considerable work from both the programmer and the compiler in order to achieve the highest performance.Īt the same time, modern language standards work hard to abstract away the details of the underlying hardware and data structures and generate generic code that aligns more with logic and mathematics than instructions and memory locations. For example, the fused multiply-add instruction is used to increase the performance and accuracy in dense linear algebra, collision detection instruction is suitable for the operation of binning in statistical calculations, and bit-masked instructions are designed for handling branches in vector calculations. Modern vector extensions to the x86-64 architecture, such as AVX2 and AVX-512, have instructions developed to handle common computational kernels. Modern x86-64 CPUs are highly complex CISC architecture machines. The tests are performed on an Intel Xeon Platinum processor featuring the Skylake architecture with AVX-512 vector instructions.Ĭolfax_Compiler_Comparison.pdf (562 KB) Table of Contents In addition to measuring the performance, we interpret the results by examining the assembly instructions produced by each compiler. The compilation time for large projects with heavy C++ templating.The speed of compiled C/C++ code parallelized with OpenMP 4.x directives for multi-threading and vectorization.We measure two aspects of the compilers’ performance: This paper reports a performance-based comparison of six state-of-the-art C/C++ compilers: AOCC, Clang, G++, Intel C++ compiler, PGC++, and Zapcc.

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