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Originally Posted by Trumpcard
Im also at a loss as to what your big complaint with gentoo is then...
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I certainly didn't mean to start a flame war, but my complaint would be that the system would take many many hours (possibly days) to install, justifying the time spent by declaring the result as optimal. I have read many many tidbits about using icc with gentoo and can say with absolute certainty that it is not a well supported option. This doesn't mean, of course, that individual packages can't be modified to compile. Nor am I trying to imply that it is not possible to finagle and coerce gentoo into building with icc. I do, however, think it is pretty rough that a system that is so geared up for building from scratch doesn't make it _easy_ to switch default compilers.
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icc has been an option for gentoo for awhile now.. So Im confused as to what youre talking about here..
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OK, maybe I'm missing something. This is entirely possible, since I'm obviously inexperienced with gentoo. My current understanding is that if you want to have emerge build with icc instead of gcc you must use the 'use icc' construct. The port must then support that same construct. This is most definitely not the same thing as specifying a new compiler.
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What troubles are you referring to? That only a few of the package builders ensure their makefiles can take advantage of icc or are capable of compiling out of the box with icc ?
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Not being able to properly specify a new compiler for emerge, for one thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it isn't enough for a package to compile perfectly under icc, is it? The makefile has to actually be modified to support the 'use icc' construct, right? How many packages are included in a modern Linux system? That's a lot of work to ask someone to do during an install process. Moreover, all of that must be done even if everything would otherwise compile perfectly.
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Im still confused why the linux community should rush to embrace ICC over GCC other than performance benefits.
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Aside from having better support for the ANSI standard, I think that performance is the only reason. Isn't it reason enough? If you have the choice between two programs with _exactly_ identical functionality, but one runs _twice_ as fast as another, why would you ever choose the slow one? It is that same rationale that would drive me to emerge an icc system. Hell, I want to build gcc w/ icc! Why not? Wouldn't it be nice if your copy of gcc built everything 30% faster? For a person who generally installs binary packages when available (which I suspect constitutes the majority of Linux users), the license of the compiler used to make the package doesn't matter in the least, so I don't see any reason to not use the one that generates the fastest/smallest code. As far as