Release of zapcc 1.0 - Fast C++ compiler
If you remember, I recently wrote about zapcc C++ compilation speed against gcc 5.4 and clang 3.9 in which I was comparing the beta version of zapcc against gcc and clang.
I just been informed that zapcc was just released in version 1.0. I though it was a good occasion to test it again. It will be compared against gcc-4.9, gcc-5.3 and clang-3.9. This version is based on the trunk of clang-5.0.
Again, I will use my Expression Template Library (ETL) project. This is a purely header-only library with lots of templates. I'm going to compile the full test cases. This is a perfect example for long compilation times.
The current tests are made on the last version of the library and with slightly different parameters for compilation, therefore the absolute times are not comparable, but the speedups should be comparable.
Just like last time, I have configured zapcc to let is use 2Go RAM per caching server, which is the maximum allowed. Moreover, I killed the servers before each tests.
Debug results
Let's start with a debug build, with no optimizations enabled. Every build will use four threads. This is the equivalent of doing make -j4 debug/bin/etl_test without the link step.
Compiler |
|
|---|---|
g++-4.9.3 |
190.09s |
g++-5.3.0 |
200.92s |
clang++-3.9 |
313.85 |
zapcc++ |
81.25 |
Speedup VS Clang |
3.86 |
Speedup VS GCC-5.3 |
2.47 |
Speedup VS GCC-4.9 |
2.33 |
The speedups are even more impressive than last time! zapcc is almost four times fast than clang-3.9 and around 2.5 times faster than GCC-5.3. Interestingly, we can see that gcc-5.3 is slighly slower than GCC-4.9.
It seems that they have the compiler even faster!
Release results
Let's look now how the results are looking with optimizations enabled. Again, every build will use four threads. This is the equivalent of doing make -j4 release_debug/bin/etl_test without the link step.
Compiler |
|
|---|---|
g++-4.9.3 |
252.99 |
g++-5.3.0 |
264.96 |
clang++-3.9 |
361.65 |
zapcc++ |
237.96 |
Speedup VS Clang |
1.51 |
Speedup VS GCC-5.3 |
1.11 |
Speedup VS GCC-4.9 |
1.06 |
We can see that this time the speedups are not as interesting as they were. Very interestingly, it's the compiler that suffers the more from the optimization overhead. Indeed, zapcc is three times slower in release mode than it was in debug mode. Nevertheless, it still manages to beat the three other compilers, by about 10% for Gcc and 50% than clang, which is already interesting.
Conclusion
To conclude, we have observed that zapcc is always faster than the three compilers tested in this experiment. Moreover, in debug mode, the speedups are very significant, it was almost 4 times faster than clang and around 2.5 faster than gcc.
I haven't seen any problem with the tool, it's like clang and it should generate code of the same performance, but just compile it much faster. One problem I have with zapcc is that it is not based on an already released version of clang but on the trunk. That means it is hard to be compare with the exact same version of clang and it is also a risk of running into clang bugs.
Although the prices have not been published yet, it is indicated on the website that zapcc is free for non-commercial entities. Which is really great.
If you want more information, you can go to the official website of zapcc
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