In the recent discussion over the GNU Gold linker being deprecated, there was the usual LLVM vs. GCC compiler/toolchain debate. Fortunately, with recently working on some initial benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler I was following that up with some fresh LLVM Clang compiler comparison metrics on the same AMD Zen 5 hardware.
Complementing the recent GCC 14.2 vs. GCC 15.0.1 Git compiler benchmarks are now numbers added in for LLVM Clang 19.1.7 as the newest stable release as of testing along with the LLVM Clang 20.1 Git code as of last weke when testing began. The LLVM/Clang packages were obtained via the LLVM.org APT repository for convenience and reproducibility. When building all of the open-source C/C++ benchmarks under test the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were kept the same as “-O3 -march=native -flto” between testing the different compilers.
This testing is intended to provide some fresh numbers on Linux x86_64 for how Clang is competing with GCC as well as how Clang 20 is looking relative to Clang 19. Clang 20.1 stable should be out in March as the newest half-year stable release for this open-source compiler toolchain. The same AMD EPYC 9575F server was used for all of this testing.
Let’s continue in this compiler quickie with more GCC 15 and Clang 20 benchmarks coming up on more hardware given their releases in the weeks ahead.
