CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-c++gccmingwcompiler-optimization
Maestro
Maestro

Reputation: 9508

Difference between GCC binaries and MSVC binaries?

When I compile a large project (for example, Bitcoin) in both GCC (using MinGW) and in MSVC (using Visual Studio) using comparable optimization settings, the GCC binary is 6 mb and the MSVC binary is 4 mb.

Now I am wondering, does this say that MSVC produces better binaries (and I mean better as in smaller+faster)? Or doesnt this mean anything, and its just symbol-information or something unrelated to performance?

I expect a lot of comments: just benchmark it. But I'm more interested in the reason for the difference, not in the exact size/performance difference itself.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2937

Answers (3)

metamorphosis
metamorphosis

Reputation: 2107

It is possible that with -o2 only, mingw may produce slower binaries than MSVC. I haven't tested and do not know. However I do know that with -march=native enabled, in my own benchmarks (http://plflib.org/colony.htm#benchmarks) mingw outperforms MSVC (with the appropriate target optimisations) by about 20%. The main reason, I would imagine, is better customisation for individual CPU targets as opposed to MSVC's more scattershot approach. However it may be that GCC's code gen is simply better.

However, on other benchmarks MSVC might show a performance improvement. My own results are in no way definitive, but they are indicative.

Lastly I will note that yes, MSVC does produce smaller binaries in general - but watch what you #include. Including iostream in GCC/libstdc++ drags in a Ton of code, whereas in MSVC it drags in very little. And as others have said, smaller != faster necessarily.

Upvotes: 1

Roy Longbottom
Roy Longbottom

Reputation: 1192

Smaller is not necessarily faster. My latest compilations make extensive use of SIMD instructions that can have more than one set of instructions for one line of code, like some for AVX SIMD, some for SSE SIMD and some for SSE SISD. Then there can be significant loop unrolling (to maintain pipeline flow), with numerous repetitive instruction sequences.

Some might be following the same procedures as on Android via Eclipse, where a compile parameter, APP_ABI := all, generates code for arm64-v8a, armeabi, armeabi-v7a, mips, mips64, x86 and x86-64, selected automatically at run time.

Upvotes: 0

OpenUserX03
OpenUserX03

Reputation: 1458

According to this wxwidgets page on reducing executable size, Visual C++ is known to produce a smaller, faster executable, at least on Windows.

  1. Use Microsoft Visual C++ instead of gcc (Cygwin or Mingw) on Windows. It does produce smaller and faster executables.

Upvotes: 0

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