Felix von Leitner delivered a talk at the 2009 Linux Kongress about the state of the art in compiler optimization (link to PDF slides). Presentation slides by themselves are not a good way to understand a talk and it would be better to learn if video for the actual talk is posted somewhere. Compiler optimization (or lack thereof) is fairly important to FFmpeg developers.

The talk analyzes how LLVM, icc, MSVC, Sun C, and gcc generate fast code in this day and age. One basic theme I gathered is that coders should forgo clever C optimizations as they tend to be counterproductive. I wish I could believe that, but there was that recent episode where I optimized FFmpeg’s Theora decoder by removing structure dereferences. I’m sure that other performance-minded multimedia hackers will have other nits to pick with the broad generalizations in the presentation. I call your attention to the fighting words (which I have taken out of context since it’s such a fun quote) on slide 41: “Note: gcc is smarter than the video codec programmer on all platforms.” Further, slides 53-55 specifically call out madplay for inline ASM that allegedly didn’t improve efficiency vs. what the compiler could achieve with the raw C code.

On the whole, the findings are probably quite accurate for the kind of C code that most people need to write (e.g., “No need to write a >> 2 when you mean a/4!”).

Speaking of compilers, FATE now covers Intel’s 11.1 series C compiler for both 32- and 64-bit icc. I have also updated the stale snapshots of the gcc-svn for my machines (I still need to write a tool to do that for me automatically and continuously).