Horde3D

Since 2 month ago i was using MS VCS2005 and SharpDevelop compilers but after some experiments I found the .NET Framework gives very bad performance because of it's lower code execution than non-DotNet compilers and it uses much more memory (about 13mb for just a simple hello world app and up to 70mb for a program that uses some cuttingedge graphical interface) and i have seen projects compiled using MSVC2005 and they don't require the .net framework 2 installed on the users windows.(Is there anybody knows how to get out of the .net2 rid? )

After this problem I have returned to programming with old fashioned VC6 but it is very hard to use this IDE then I have searched wikipedia for C++ IDE's and I found the Code::Blocks as the best !
Code::Blocks is a crossplatform IDE and it uses the MSVC, DigitalMars, MinGW, Watcom and ...
The Code::Blocks best and fully integrated compiler for windows is MinGW.

I want to know what performance differences is between MinGW and MSVC compilers such as Code optimizations and execution speed, CPU and Memory usage and at last compiled file size and compatibilities ; If anybody have experience with those compilers please comment your experiences !

All of your ideas and helps are welcome

Many say that MSVC has better optimization, though I recently found some people (which should have knowledge about that) that told that MinGW is often faster. The difference shouldn't be too big in any case though, they should both create comparable code in terms of speed and size. Also Intel C++ is told to be faster than these two, at least on some systems.

MinGW produces larger C++ binaries than MSVC though afaik, because of the way the standard library gets linked iirc.

(I am on Linux and therefore don't really care about this as GCC is the only really option)

The differences in terms of performance are pretty much ignorable. If you write clean code you can compile in either compiler without any big issues. Even if you do not own the compiler you can easily find someone to compile it for you personally i use MSVC compilers as do "most" on the game development industry.

From what I have seen, MSVC tends to be a pretty decent compiler, and tends to out perform MinGW (aka GCC) on Windows. Intel C++ and Comeau (a little more expensive) tend to outperform both by a considerable amount, but for most things, any of them will be fine.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

I use both MSVC 2008 and Code::Blocks/MinGW(GCC) for my project. Performance is about the same.

At work I also use MSVC 2003 and MSVC 2005 for writing pure C++ (no Dot Net!).

You can easily use the MSVC compilers to generate non-DotNet projects - just make sure to choose a "Win32" project template instead of a "CLR" project template.

Of course msvc is faster. because it is created by people who have access to windows source code.
It generates smaller binaries. But for the speed, I don't think there is too much difference.

The code size of MinGW compiled binaries is much bigger because it does static linking of the std C/C++ libraries.
MSVC use dynamic linking against the VC runtime libraries. So you have to add the MSVC runtime libraries to compare the size

The speed is basicly the same except you use many try/catch blocks in your code. In this case MinGW is slower because of the poor exception implementation. (Maybe changed with GCC 4.x?)

At the VC++6 time the GCC was the best choice but these years the MSVC2005 is better than GCC 3 because of it's faster and optimized codes and smaller compiled file sizes. But it seems GCC provides faster codes on linux.
Already GCC 4.x is improved in performance and code optimizations and by using MinGW + Code::Blocks it competes with MSVC2005 Express on windows platform too.

I will do some post about MSVC2005 Pro vs C::B + MinGW later (next 2 month ).

Yes, would be interesting. But I guess there is not much speed difference between the state of the art c-compilers.