Dhrystone speed dmd vs gdc

[Dave]

downs wrote:
> I just ran the samples/dhry.d compiled with DMD 1.007 vs GDC .23 svn on gcc 4.1.1 using MinGW, on a Pentium M with 1.6g.
> The used flags were -O -release -inline for DMD and -ffast-math -O3 -frelease -finline-functions for GDC.
> The observed VAX MIPS ratings were 3280 for GDC, but only 2570 for DMD.
> (Note that the GDC rating could be increased to 3480 by adding -msse -mfpmath=sse,387, but that is somewhat risky).
> All tests were run with realtime priority.
> Do you think this difference in a synthetic benchmark translates into an actual speed difference for real-world applications?
> Did I miss any DMD compiler flags?
> Greetings   --downs

The DMD version maybe using a higher resolution timer -- GetTickCount() vs time() for the GDC 
version. If so, that may have a lot to do with it.

On a P4 linux box, if I use an external timer ('time'), DMD consistently outperforms GDC with the 
switches above by about 15% or so.