On 9/7/11, Vladimir Makarov <vmaka...@redhat.com> wrote: > Some people asked me to do comparison of GCC-4.6 and LLVM-2.9 (both > released this spring) as I did GCC-LLVM comparison in previous year. > > You can find it on http://vmakarov.fedorapeople.org/spec under > 2011 GCC-LLVM comparison tab entry.
The format of these graphs exaggerates differences. The reason is that our hind brains cannot help but compare the heights of bars and ignore the non-zero bases. In short, non-zero based graphs are lies. So, please 0-base all the graphs. The graphs should show compilation time from 0 up, execution time from 0 up, SPEC score from 0 up, etc. A consequence is that you will get rid of the "change" graphs. In my mind, an interesting graph would be to plot the execution time of the benchmarks as a function of the compile time of the benchmarks. This graph would show you, in particular, what you buy or lose by changing compilers and/or optimization/debug levels. -- Lawrence Crowl
