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gwern comments on Algorithmic Progress in Six Domains - Less Wrong Discussion

24 Post author: lukeprog 03 August 2013 02:29AM

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Comment author: gwern 03 August 2013 06:01:01PM 3 points [-]

JS performance is interesting since 4 companies (Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft) have poured money and talent at this arms race, probably the first time we've had this happen for basically-fully-compatible implementations of the same language (happy to hear if I'm wrong).

There used to be an awful lot of commercial C compilers before GCC killed off most of them, and even now there's still a big 3: GCC, Intel's compiler, and LLVM.

Comment author: Alexandros 03 August 2013 06:06:46PM 2 points [-]

Yes, C is the one counterexample I had in mind, but I vaguely recall compatibility issues much larger than is acceptable for JS. I might be wrong.

I remember porting code between GCC and ICC basically painlessly but not so much the details. Are the three compilers expected to run code tuned on the others with 0 complaints? How prevalent are compiler-specific settings? (I do remember needing to do inline assembly in a special way, I think).

Comment author: Alexandros 03 August 2013 06:24:12PM *  4 points [-]

Ok, got some answers. It seems GCC leads by adding non-standard features, and ICC/Clang follow to be compatible. This doesn't seem to be the case in the JS world, where the competitors seem to be on a more equal footing (though V8 has the mindshare lead, with node.js etc.). If this is enough to support the "first ever" description is I guess a matter of personal taste at this point. All in all, thanks for the counter Gwern.