Thank you to those who took the survey on the x86 Open64 Compiler Suite. As promised, we’re sharing the results so you can see how your fellow developers are using the compiler suite.

We were pleased with the good survey response, which included an even mix of uses in home, academic and commercial settings. We heard from approximately twice as many C/C++ users as Fortran users. HPC applications were the most common workloads you’ve built with Open64, but the compiler was also used for other workloads including databases, gaming, productivity and media applications. Most respondents develop on Linux but there was a sizeable minority developing on Windows and a small group of Solaris developers. For almost half the respondents, having an Open Source compiler was very important, while the remainder use a mix of Open Source and commercial compilers.

Most respondents use GCC as their primary compiler and sizeable minorities use ICC, Sun Studio, PGI and Pathscale compilers. Your survey responses and detailed feedback underscored the importance of being able to compile the same code as other compilers – but provide equal or better performance. Most of you rated Open64 as having faster or the same performance as your other compilers, but a number of you also gave us some examples of where we can continue to improve. While not a surprise, it was nice to see that our efforts to improve both performance and reliability are the same areas you see as most important. When it comes to compiler options, the –O3, -O2, -Ofast, -mp (OpenMP) and –apo (autoparallel) were the most common ones tried. Very few had tried more detailed optimizations. We encourage you to check out those detailed optimizations and let us know what you think.

The detailed responses to our question of top improvement areas were particularly helpful. Your wish list had a number of specific requests, but the following were among the most common themes:
- Optimization and performance improvements
- Reliability and compatibility, particularly with gcc
- Windows support
- Better support for other platforms such as Debian packages or OpenSolaris
- Fortran 2003 and OpenMP 3.0 support
with a wide variety of other topics giving us suggestions for everything from our User Guide, GPU support, source build instructions to even one request for Ada05 support.

We’ll use this survey input to help guide our work for subsequent releases of Open64. We may also follow up with some of you for more detailed understanding of feedback you’ve provided. As always, we welcome any additional input on how we can continue to improve this compiler suite, either in the comments here or in the Open64 forum.

Mike Vermeulen is the Engineering Manager of the x86 Open64 Compiler Suite team.  His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.