earticle

영어

Software reliability has always been a concern for both software producers and consumers. Because of their role in binary code generation, compilers have a significant impact on software performance. Although many works have been conducted on compilers, little has been done to study their impact on software reliability. Thus, people often face a void of useful knowledge when deciding which compiler to use when developing software to meet a specific reliability target. This paper tries to provide some guidance in compiler selection for users by performing a cross-comparison study on popular C compilers: GCC, Intel, Sun, PGI, LLVM, and Visual Studio. We use Fedora, Mac OS x86, and Windows as our platforms and SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suite as our test set. Our results show that on average, the GCC C compiler is the best for Linux environment, and PGI C compiler is superior to Intel on UNIX based OSs. However Intel shows better performance and VS shows a higher efficiency on Windows OS. Additionally this result is consistent with the user experience based on our survey feedback.