[Python-Dev] Compiling Python on Linux with Intel's icc

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:29:39 +0000
Alex Leach <albl500 at york.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> >Did you compare the actual code sizes? The `size` command can help you
> >with that.
> 
> I'd never used `size` before... Thanks for the tip; looks like the Intel
> build is actually smaller..? :/
> 
> # ICC version (`ls -lh` ==> 4.7MB)
> $ size ./python 
>    text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
> 1659760  276904   63760 2000424  1e8628 ./python
> 
> # System version (`ls -lhH` ==>2.7MB)
> $ size /usr/bin/python
>    text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
> 2303805  427728   74808 2806341  2ad245 /usr/bin/python
> 
> I definitely don't get what's going on here! Does this information relate
> to linked objects being in shared or static libs? Is this indicative
> anything, either good or bad?

Mmmh, your system version might have been compiled with different
options, so you may want to compare with a hand-compiled gcc build. The
"text" column gives you the code size. Arguably, a smaller code size
will make the instruction cache more efficient.

cheers

Antoine.