logoalt Hacker News

mbrock • last Monday at 9:45 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

If you missed it, djb himself posted this cute graph of "nearly 9000 microbenchmarks of Fil-C vs. clang on cryptographic software (each run pinned to 1 core on the same Zen 4)":

https://cr.yp.to/2025/20251028-filcc-vs-clang.html

I've heard Filip has some ideas about optimizing array performance to avoid capability checks on every access... doing that thread safely seems like an interesting challenge but I guess there are ways!

Replies

brucehoult • last Monday at 11:13 PM

Sure of course I followed that link. I've really got no idea what the horizontal axis is! But there is a huge cluster of results between 1x and 1.5x execution time.

And, the kind of code he is interested in is not necessarily the same as the kind of code I'm interested in. In fact I know it's not!

As one more data point, compiling my little benchmark with gcc, without any optimisation flag.

     1964ms gcc primes.c -o primes -O
     3723ms fil-c primes.c -o primes -O
     3753ms gcc primes.c -o primes
    16334ms fil-c primes.c -o primes
Fil-C with -O is almost identical to gcc without.