I’ve been curious for some time just how differently various C++ compilers might perform on a real world code base, how much improvement over time can one expect, etc. Today, I finally did a benchmark on that.
The compilers used were GNU gcc 3.4.6 (pretty much the oldest you can expect these days, but still found in the wild, e.g. on that Centos 4.7 box I used for benchmarks); GNU gcc 4.5.0 (bleeding edge, built from source); and Intel icc 11.1. Hardware was 2x dual-core Xeon 3.6 Ghz, making a total of 4x cores.
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