Here is an ebuild to install the Intel C++ Compiler for linux. I haven't used it to compile anything in an ebuild yet but I hope to do that soon. I've only compiled a few apps I've written. A few informal bechmarks I came across showed icc to be quite faster than gcc on high end pentium hardware. (The ones I remember was a scene in PovRay that took 200 seconds to render when compiled with gcc only took 150 seconds when comiled with icc. And lame was about 5% faster wehn compiled with icc which is impressive considering how optimized lame is already.) I suggest dev-lang/icc icc is not 100% gcc compatible but it works with a lot of apps. I think it might be desirable to have some way for an ebuild to show that it is safe to compile this app with icc for a more optimized version. (That is why you installed Gentoo right?) Or maybe the ebuild should detect icc and choose to use it. I dunno yet, just some thoughts.
Created attachment 534 [details] icc-5.0.1 ebuild and related files. # tar tzf icc-5.0.1.tar.gz icc/ icc/files/ icc/files/5.0.1/ icc/files/5.0.1/05icc icc/files/digest-icc-5.0.1 icc/ChangeLog icc/icc-5.0.1.ebuild
For the curious I've done two bechmarks so far, both on a Dual Pentium II 400 with 754 megs of ram on a tmpfs file system using the same 33669120 byte source file. In both cases I simply changed the make file to use icc instead of gcc. No tweaking of parameters was use so the gcc options were being used with icc even when it didn't understand that option. In otherwords, I'm sure better could be gotten if I put more effort into it. `bzip2 -9` compiled with gcc took 1m42.662s to compress. `bzip2 -9` compiled with icc took 1m35.825s to compress. This is about a 7.1% speed increase. `gzip -9` compiled with gcc took 0m18.172s to compress. `gzip -9` compiled with icc took 0m16.882s to compress. This is about a 7.8% speed increase. Also I checked that icc created the exact same output a the gcc version of each app. When I get time I'll see if I can get mozilla, X, and/or artsd to work with icc for some noticable improvements. (Those were choosen because `top` when sorted by cpu time (press T) have used the most.)
Available as dev-lang/icc-5.0.1
