announce: egcs benchmark suite, alpha release

[Marc Lehmann <pcg@goof.com>]

I'm pleased to announce the first public release of the egcs benchmark suite.

WHAT IS IT?

   The egcs benchmark suite is a collection of individual tests used to
   determine relative performance changes of specific optimizations. There are
   tests that check performance of different datatypes on the same problem,
   tests that measure the C++ abstraction penalty, tests measuring function
   inlining/call overhead and more...

   Regular benchmarking will also allow to detect optimization problems.

WHAT IS IT _NOT_?

   It's not a general purpose benchmark library. It's unsuitable for comparing
   performance of one machine/os to another, and it's also unsuitable to compare
   performance between different compilers. Its sole purpose is to measure speed
   enhancements (or deficiencies) between egcs compiler revisions.

   In short, what the testsuite is for compiler correctness, is the benchmark
   suite for optimizer quality.

WHAT WE NEED

   at the moment are people that alpha test the release, give compatibility
   hints, detect problems with the setup.

   if the suite turns out to be useful, we need regular testers so we can fill
   the benchmark database and write cute perl programs that draw even cuter
   graphs ;)

   Also we need input on how to handle compiler switches, i.e. should
   we run a single test with -O2, or multiple tests with -O2, -O3, -O3
   -funroll-loops etc. (and how do we keep the results comparable in the
   latter case)

WHERE TO GET IT?

   At the moment its "only" available via cvs. Instead of checking out the
   "egcs" directory you can check out the "benchmarks" directory. (Just follow
   the instructions for checking out "egcs" but replace it by "benchmarks")

HOW TO USE IT?

   Yes, the README is not quite up-to-date, but everything you should have to do is to type:

   make

   which will compile & run all benchmarks and automatically mail me the
   results, testing everything in the package.

THANKS

   OH YES, thanks a lot to Jan Hubicka, who not only had the original idea to
   create the benchmark suite, but also delivered all the initial tests and
   programmed the initial testing framework.


      -----==-                                             |
      ----==-- _                                           |
      ---==---(_)__  __ ____  __       Marc Lehmann      +--
      --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ /       pcg@goof.com      |e|
      -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\       XX11-RIPE         --+
    The choice of a GNU generation                       |
                                                         |