Friday, July 29, 2011

Peter Geoghegan's blog: Could Clang displace GCC generally? Part II: Performance of PostgreSQL binaries

Peter Geoghegan's blog: Could Clang displace GCC generally? Part II: Performance of PostgreSQL binaries: "So, is it ready for prime-time? Well, not quite. Even my bleeding edge Fedora 15 system only comes with Clang 2.8, and only Clang 2.9 is listed as supported in 9.1. These build time figures are only obtainable on very recent revisions of Clang. While I’m extremely encouraged by our pgbench benchmark results, I hesitate to recommend the use of Clang for building production PostgreSQL binaries just yet. The benchmark is quite synthetic, and may not be a great proxy for general performance, although it certainly wasn’t cherry-picked.  I encourage others to independently reproduce my work here, and to suggest alernative benchmarks.

I can heartily recommend Clang for hacking on PostgreSQL today. I was also impressed with how accessible the Clang developers are if you have a problem. Sometimes you have to be a bit persistent, but in general the Clang community are quite responsive to end-users concerns."