[Numpy-discussion] code performanceon windows (32 and/or 64 bit) using SWIG: C++ compiler MS vs.cygwin

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 5:29 AM, Sebastian Haase <haase at msg.ucsf.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
> I was wondering if people could comment on which compiler produces faster code,
> MS-VS2003 or cygwin g++ ?
> I use Python 2.5 and SWIG.  I have C/C++ routines for large (maybe
> 10MB, 100MB or even >1GB (on XP 64bit)) data processing.
> I'm not talking about BLAS or anything like that .... just for-loops
> mostly on contiguous memory.

On windows xp 64 bits, the choice is easy: there is no working native
g++ compiler yet, there are quite a few bugs ( in particular the
driver is broken, which means you have to call the compiler, assembler
and linker manually). AFAIK, cygwin cannot run 64 bits binaries
(cygwin itself is only available on 32 bits for sure), and you can't
cross compile easily.

David