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In article <583@ecn-pc.UUCP>, sandersr@ecn-pc.UUCP (Robert C Sanders) writes:
> I am very partial to the Computer Innovations C86 compiler, but I also
> like the Microsoft C compiler.  The MS compiler is slower, [ ... ]

Not in my experience.  I compiled the same (small model) program on three
compilers, keeping track of time and code sizes.  Here is the summary:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


The "ls.c" program was compiled using the CI-C86 compiler v 2.10 (cxls.exe),
the DeSmet compiler v 2.3 (dxls.exe) and the Microsoft C compiler v 3.0 
(mxls.exe).  The Microsoft compiler had slightly more source code than the 
other two; an #ifdef added a few extra lines of code to speed up screen 
printing.  

Here are the compile times, using RAMdisk for all of the CIC and DeSmet
compilers, and temp storage for Microsoft, which is too big to fit in
RAMdisk.  Source files were read from hard disk.

Compile times:                 Ratio

cxls.exe    3:37   (217 s)      5.1
dxls.exe    0:42   ( 42 s)      1.0
mxls.exe    2:48   (168 s)      4.0

Here are the resulting file sizes:

d:/work/?xls.exe
--w  15205  30 Jan  8:28p cxls.exe    
--w  17920  30 Jan  5:02p dxls.exe    
--w  12816  30 Jan  8:33p mxls.exe    

Execution times were measured for the command "xls -l d:/bin" which printed
a complete screenful of data; the executable files were in RAMdisk to
minimize loading time.  Output was to screen, and into a file (in RAMdisk).

Execution times:

            To Screen   To file      Ratios

cxls.exe      6.5 s       3.0 s     1.6  1.6
dxls.exe      5.0 s       6.5 s     1.2  3.4
mxls.exe      4.1 s       1.9 s     1.0  1.0


Summary:  

DeSmet compiles 4 times faster than Microsoft, 5 times faster than CIC.
Microsoft generates the smallest code with the fastest execution.
CI-C86 has nothing outstanding to recommend it.
-- 
Ed Nather
Astronomy Dept, U of Texas @ Austin
{allegra,ihnp4}!{noao,ut-sally}!utastro!nather
nather@astro.AS.UTEXAS.EDU