* * * * *
                                        
   It's a stupid benchmark about compiling a million lines of code, what else
                                 did I expect?
                                        
I came across a claim that the V programming langauge [1] can compile 1.2
million lines of code per second [2]. Then I found out that the code was
pretty much just 1,200,000 calls to println('hello world'). Still, I was
interested in seeing how GCC (Gnu's Not Unix Compiler Collection) [3] would
fare. So I coded up this:

-----[ C ]-----
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
  printf("Hello world!\n");
  /* 1,199,998 more calls to printf() */
  printf("Hello world!\n");
  return 0;
}
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----

which ends up being 33M (Megabyte), and … 

-----[ shell ]-----
[spc]lucy:/tmp>time gcc h.c
gcc: Internal error: Segmentation fault (program cc1)
Please submit a full bug report.
See <URL:http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla> for instructions.

real    14m36.527s
user    0m40.282s
sys     0m17.497s
[spc]lucy:/tmp>
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----

Fourteen minutes for GCC (Gnu's Not Unix Compiler Collection) to figure out I
didn't have enough memory on the 32-bit system to compile it (and the
resulting core file exceeded physical memory by three times). I then tried on
a 64-bit system with a bit more memory, and I fared a bit better:

-----[ shell ]-----
[spc]saltmine:/tmp>time gcc h.c

real    7m37.555s
user    2m3.000s
sys     1m23.353s
[spc]saltmine:/tmp>
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----

This time I got a 12M executable in 7½ minutes, which seems a bit long to me
for such a simple (but large) program. I mean, Lua was able to compile an 83M
script in 6 minutes [4], on the same 32-bit system as above, and that was
considered a bug [5]!

But I used GCC, which does some optimizations by default. Perhaps if I try no
optimization?

-----[ shell ]-----
[spc]saltmine:/tmp>time gcc -O0 h.c

real    7m6.939s
user    2m2.972s
sys     1m27.237s
[spc]saltmine:/tmp>
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----

Wow. A whole 30 seconds faster. Way to go, GCC! Woot!

[1] https://github.com/vlang/v
[2] https://lobste.rs/s/rh1pbo/v_source_code_released#c_u4dyn7
[3] https://gcc.gnu.org/
[4] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-11/msg00463.html
[5] https://www.lua.org/bugs.html#5.1.4-6

Email author at sean@conman.org

.