In QHJ #3, I reported on some benchmarks that I ran on Lattice C and Small-C. Now that I had C68, I decided to run the benchmarks against it to see how it compares with the other two compilers.
Here is how all three compilers compare:
| Prime Numbers | Small-C | Lattice C | C68 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 29000-32767 | 5 Sec | 3 Sec | 6 Sec |
| 1000-32767 | 32 Sec | 20 Sec | 42 Sec |
| Recursion | 189 Sec | 193 Sec | 227 Sec |
As it turns out, C68 seems to be the slowest compiler on all of the benchmarks. Since C68 was written for a variety of systems, it’s optimzer may not be tweaked for the QL.
If you have any applications that are speed dependent you might be better off using Lattice C. For porting software from MS-DOS or UNIX to the QL, C68 is the way to go. Also C68 provides full QDOS support, whereas Lattice C provides only access to traps (you have to write your own functions to utilise the traps).
Not having the time to really get into C, I still find Small-C good enough for my uses. Small-C’s compiler is hands-down the fastest of the three.