Richard Guenther wrote:
Of course SPEC consists of real life applications. Whether it is a good representation for todays real life applications is another question, but it certainly is a very good set of tests.
It's mostly small programs by its nature, it is not very practical to include real million line applications in a test suite like this. To say it is certainly a very good set of tests is fairly contentious I would say, since time and time again, the experience is that spec marc values are not indicative of real performance. Now oddly enough that's *least* true of gcc, since compared to other compilers less effort has been put into tweaking spec numbers. But I still maintain I am more interested in figures from real customer applications than bench mark suites of this kind. And the usual discovery is that optimizations are less effective, at least in my experience.
