GCC 8 vs. LLVM Clang 6 Performance At End Of Year 2017

The Minion constraint solver performed roughly the same between compilers.

There were no major upsets in the other common benchmarks tested on GCC 8 and Clang 6.

While GCC overall still led with the most wins over the LLVM Clang C/C++ compiler on this Intel Core i9 7980XE Skylake-AVX512 system, overall, the results are increasingly close. In many of the benchmark results the outcome was very tight between the competing compilers and much closer performance than we've seen compared to years ago when GCC dominated in a majority of the benchmarks. Clang still benefits from generally quicker compile times, but it's a tight race aside from that and it will be interesting to see how both Clang and GCC evolve as we move into 2018.

LLVM Clang 6.0 will be branching next week for getting its stable release out likely by the end of February while GCC 8 is currently being stabilized for its debut as GCC 8.1 likely in March. Following that, the race is on with LLVM Clang 7.0 and GCC 9.0 to see what new performance optimizations and compiler innovations we'll see out of these leading open-source code compilers.