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PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

[Posted June 15, 2011 by corbet]

PathScale has announced that its EKOPath 4 compiler suite will be turned into an open-source project. "This release includes documentation and the complete development stack, including compiler, debugger, assembler, runtimes and standard libraries. EKOPath is the product of years of ongoing development, representing one of the industries highest performance Intel 64 and AMD C, C++ and Fortran compilers." All that's missing is an actual link to the source; it appears to be showing up on github; the license seems to be GPLv3.
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PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 15, 2011 14:15 UTC (Wed) by meuh (guest, #22042) [Link]

Phoronix did some teasing about this release (search for codename "Dirndl").
BTW, The site shows some benchmarks which are pretty amazing. PathScale Open-Sources The EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 15, 2011 14:30 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (7 responses)

The debugger was also released, initially under a BSD license and then some of the source code was switched to the CDDL license.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 15, 2011 15:18 UTC (Wed) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link] (2 responses)

Although having another compiler open-sourced is nice I'm more interested in the debugger. While I personally find gdb very powerful any time I think of tweaking it I'm put of by some of the hairy looking code.

I wonder if there are any other core tools which would benefit from competition?

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 15, 2011 19:20 UTC (Wed) by mathias (guest, #40647) [Link] (1 responses)

You might be interested to know that LLVM also is working on a debugger: LLDB (http://lldb.llvm.org/). It currently only works on Mac OS X, but it seems to be under active development.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 16, 2011 3:08 UTC (Thu) by codestr0m (guest, #75719) [Link]

While the LLVM people may troll all over about their projects - (not to say I wouldn't consider the same ;) - PathDB is portable - Works on Linux, FreeBSD and would be trivial to port anywhere else. (Even our beloved OSX) It's also very GDB drop-in compatible, super clean code and in the foreseeable future could be production ready. (We're 50% passing the GDB test suite now and with some months of work I'm confident we could fix the remaining parts)

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 16, 2011 3:05 UTC (Thu) by codestr0m (guest, #75719) [Link] (3 responses)

The debugger was never released under BSD. It's been CDDL since day 1 and privately there's been discussion that if the BSD community significantly contributed to it, we'd consider BSD licensing it.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 16, 2011 4:03 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (2 responses)

Looks like on day 0 it was actually GPL not BSD or CDDL:

https://github.com/path64/debugger/commit
/cd121fdda95953651c17f0e3e3c4d882cdaa11cf

My comment about BSD was because I saw the BSD license in some files and "Updated license to CDDL" as the latest commit message on many files.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 29, 2011 14:43 UTC (Wed) by codestr0m (guest, #75719) [Link] (1 responses)

Oopse.. Yes in the *very* beginning it was GPL, but then changed. (We thought that the BSD community would help with a more permissive license was used. Guess we were wrong)

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 30, 2011 8:12 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

That is a shame. I guess you won't be switching from CDDL to BSD? Will you be switching from CDDL back to the GPL?

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 15, 2011 14:54 UTC (Wed) by handock (guest, #73633) [Link] (2 responses)

The compiler produces huge binaries fit to blow every I$.
I guess it's best to think of it as a niche product for FP intensive programs and benchmarks.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 16, 2011 2:47 UTC (Thu) by lindahl (guest, #15266) [Link]

-Os has not been a huge priority over the years, but it exists and can be improved. If they open sourced the optimization tool then you can use it to find out what makes binaries smaller.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 16, 2011 3:23 UTC (Thu) by codestr0m (guest, #75719) [Link]

Code size isn't the panacea for performance and more importantly people who actually engineer compilers know that most of the time locality is more important. This isn't to say we're not working on or interested in code size reductions. In the 4.0.11 update we're very likely to putback some CFI work that will significantly reduce the size of C++ binaries with debugging enabled. In the future we'll follow this up with DWARF4 support and compression. In every other circumstance measurable performance takes precedence over size unless the -Os flag is used.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 15, 2011 14:54 UTC (Wed) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link]

Fabulous news. I use this compiler all the time on a 32 node cheap compute AMD64 (opteron multicore) cluster. It is so much faster than gcc it is not funny.There have been so many issue with this compiler moving from one vendor to the next that I nearly gave up on it. Glad I didn't.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 15, 2011 15:01 UTC (Wed) by Otus (subscriber, #67685) [Link] (4 responses)

The GitHub one isn't the same thing.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 15, 2011 15:29 UTC (Wed) by rillian (guest, #11344) [Link]

No? The irc channel listed on the pathscale.com links to it.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 16, 2011 3:25 UTC (Thu) by codestr0m (guest, #75719) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes the one on github is the same thing - There's two places to look though. github.com/path64 and now more is open at github.com/pathscale. Assembler, developer docs and some build related things we're cleaning up for release this week.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 16, 2011 4:10 UTC (Thu) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link] (1 responses)

Want to iterate the thanks you've received on Phoronix Phorums for your rapid and informative responses to specific questions. Very best kind of PR. Very much appreciated.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 16, 2011 23:58 UTC (Thu) by MisterIO (guest, #36192) [Link]

I agree, very appreciated!

CPU?

Posted Jun 16, 2011 4:34 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (3 responses)

I got the impression this compiler is for x86_64 architecture only. Is this correct? The ability to focus on doing one architecture well might partly explain why it does so much better in benchmarks than GCC. It also means it is not really a competitor for GCC.

But good news in any case! Big thanks to PathScale!

CPU?

Posted Jun 16, 2011 5:49 UTC (Thu) by lindahl (guest, #15266) [Link] (2 responses)

This compiler has, at various stages of its life, had competitive performance on cisc (i386, x86_64), risc (mips), and vliw (itanium).

What about ARM?

Posted Jun 16, 2011 8:11 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

GCC can of course be improved, but for x86-64 it already generates decent code (and IA32 is dead: it certainly is still popular today, but it's stupid to think about it WRT the future). The sad story is ARM... Have you ever developed an ARM backend?

What about ARM?

Posted Jun 16, 2011 9:28 UTC (Thu) by codestr0m (guest, #75719) [Link]

Yes/No/Yes - if you check path64 commit history you'll see until recently we had ARM code in the tree, but the merge was *really* ugly and we ripped it all out. Our next incarnation of ARM support is in the planning phase and I expect we'll have something before the end of the year.

Part of the problem with supporting a lot of targets in the current codebase is the unruly #if hell that makes the source totally unreadable. Better abstraction and coding practices I think could work around this in some current areas, but other things just need a total redesign/rewrite.

fwiw sister compilers to path64/EKOPath cover just about every target you could image. (DSP, VLIW, ARM, MIPS. etc) It's not public knowledge, but I know of 4-6 commercial compilers based off the previously released EKOPath sources or some derivative of pro64. Does this make it competition to GCC (yes), but not as a unified voice or direct sense. GCC isn't going anywhere and serves a more broad community than we do currently. The real competition is Intel on Intel, MSVC and other commercial Fortran compilers.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 17, 2011 13:09 UTC (Fri) by mjr (guest, #6979) [Link]

Seems like a very worthwhile contribution, so kudos to PathScale and its people for making this happen.

One wonders how quick, if at all, distributions will be to adopt EKOPath for notable portions of their compiled packages on supported platforms. Obviously the Gentooers will be recompiling their systems next week ;)

There's probably going to be patching and/or falling back to gcc needed for some stuff no matter the reputedly good compatibility, so there will be actual work involved, but it'd seem it could be worth it.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 17, 2011 18:09 UTC (Fri) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link] (1 responses)

Now this IS exciting news! The two commercial vendors that get mentioned at the supercomputer conferences are Green Hills and PathScale, with PathScale being the better-regarded as far as I could tell. PCG, Intel, etc, never seemed to get a whole lot of look-in, GCC being the only other compiler routinely discussed and compared against.

In terms of competition, I don't see that really being significant in Open Source where cooperation tends to be the bigger rule. It might, however, impact the Linux kernel since it's very popular in the high-end market and the main obstacle to being more compiler-agnostic has been that there weren't any decent open source C compilers besides GCC. If the bulk of developers can't use the compiler, there's no incentive to develop for it and no means of testing with it.

It might also impact the C libraries that are out there that rival glibc for the same reason. Their developers can install multiple open-source compilers if they wish.

Another area this could have an impact is on the embedded space, which has traditionally been extremely closed and frigid. With Linux being able to exploit a greater range of tools in a greater number of ways, and with embedded systems incapable of exploiting any of the benefits as things stand, we might see embedded compilers facing greater pressure to come out of the closet.

PathScale EKOPath 4 compiler suite open-sourced

Posted Jun 18, 2011 20:10 UTC (Sat) by daglwn (guest, #65432) [Link]

> Now this IS exciting news! The two commercial vendors that get mentioned
> at the supercomputer conferences are Green Hills and PathScale, with
> PathScale being the better-regarded as far as I could tell. PCG, Intel,
> etc, never seemed to get a whole lot of look-in, GCC being the only other
> compiler routinely discussed and compared against.

Which conferences? All I ever hear talked about is PGI and Intel with grudging mention of PathScale for codes that for some reason require it. Oh, and the Cray compiler for those machines. :) PathScale is pretty much seen as dead, though that may change with this move.

Still, this is a very exciting development! The Fortran frontend alone is a huge contribution.


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