I want to talk about compilers a bit. I haven’t really worried about compilers in a few years, but since it sounds like there may be some interesting things going on in that area, it seemed like there might be something to look into again.
There’s a lot of talk these days about clang and llvm as a replacement for gcc. This has gained some momentum since Apple’s switching over to llvm (which ended up causing trouble for people who use MacPorts and lots of UNIX tools on the Mac, but that’s another story). The various BSDs seem to have shown some interest in this too.
Ignoring the non-technical issues that seem to drive some people in this direction (I don’t really understand the anti-GNU sentiment that seems to come up relatively frequently these days either), llvm is supposed to be better at optimizing output than gcc. This is where I actually get interested.
Most of my work on optimizing code comes from doing simulations in FORTRAN 77 when I was in grad school. So the first thing I looked for to test this was a FORTRAN frontend for llvm. This may seem like an odd thing to want, but lots of technical and scientific work is still done in FORTRAN. It is actually a great language for a certain set of problems. Turns out clang is pretty much for C-like things (I guess the name should have been a hint there).
To support languages like FORTRAN, there is a project from llvm called Dragon Egg. It isn’t really a compiler, it is just a plugin to allow you to use llvm to do optimization for gcc (and since they claim FORTRAN support, presumable gfortran).
So, I installed it, checked out a copy of ZEUS-MP from my svn repo, modified the makefile, and tried to compile it. And nothing. I got strange build errors right away. Now Zeus is extremely portable at this point. In the past it was known to run on UNICOS, Irix, and lots of other long gone systems. I’ve personally made sure that it could compile with the Intel Compilers, Portland Group Compilers, G77, GFortran, and Sun Studio Fortran Compiler. I actually found the best performance with the gcc based compilers (g77 and gfortran). Seemed surprising considering that in toy examples, the Intel Compilers generally perform best. I have a figure or two related to this in my dissertation.
I could probably fight and try to get zeus to compile this way, but I don’t do hydrodynamics or FORTRAN for a living any more, and this was just supposed to be a quick experiment, so I don’t think I’ll put the time into it. Maybe they will eventually get FORTRAN support to work better and I’ll try this again. But for now, I’ll stick with the GNU Compilers.