[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] Drop support for gcc-2.95

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 12:08:52AM +0200, Ivo wrote:
> On Monday 10 July 2006 14:38, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > Search the archives, I have done extensive compiler comparisons on x86 a
> > long time ago.  The result was that gcc 3.x prior to 3.4 just plain
> > sucks.  3.4 finally managed to produce binaries that are as fast as those
> > created by 2.95, but it takes considerably longer (40-60% IIRC).
> >
> > We can discuss this once a gcc >= 3.4 is part of all mainstream
> > distributions (meaning at least Debian stable).  Until then it's
> > completely out of the question.
> 
> I have done a small test myself this afternoon. I wanted to have the latest 
> of each gcc branch (2.x, 3.x and 4.x) on my system anyway, so I thought I'd 
> compile MPlayer a few times and have them decode some video. I disabled 
> alsa because gcc 4.1.1 bugs on my version of /usr/include/alsa/pcm.h. Don't 
> need it anyway. System is an AMD Sempron 2400+ (ia32), clocked at 1667MHz 
> (no overclocking), with 512MB RAM.

No one debates the performance on these sorts of systems. What'd
questionable is i386, i486, pentium, pentium-mmx, k6, k6-2, k6-iii,
...

> I'd think 2.95.3 still performs pretty well. The resulting binary is only a 
> tad slower (<10% for typical use),

10% is huge, for MPlayer. Even 1% is significant. Actually if MPlayer
is even spending 10% of its time in C code that means there's not
enough asm..

> but it compiles way faster.

Yes...

Rich