Re: A new benchmark

[Philipp Klaus Krause]

stdcbench has improved substantially since my first post to comp.lang.c.

The current version consists of 2 modules, which on typical systems
should contribute about equally to the score.

c90base:
It benchmarks a commonly-implemented subset of what the standard
requires for freestanding implementations of C90. It consists of three
submodules:
1) Huffman/RLE decompression (adapted from real-world code)
2) Integer matrix multiplication (synthetic)
3) Insertion sort (adapted from real-world code)

c90lib:
Benchmarks the standard library.
I consists of two submodules:
1) Computation of lnlc-width (adapted from real-world code)
2) Peephole optimizer (simplified from real-world code)

C99 features (e.g. bool, restrict) are used where available, but not
necessary.

So far, stdcbench seems to achieve the goals: benchmark a wide range of
important standard c functionality, without giving too much emphasis to
any particular aspect.

Scores are reported for each module and as total.

Example output from a i7-7500U-based system (benchmark compiled with GCC
7.2.0 using -O2 -march=native):

stdcbench 0.2
stdcbench c90base score: 7827
stdcbench c90lib score: 6548
stdcbench final score: 14375

Example output from a STM8AF5288 at 16 Mhz (benchmark compiled with SDCC
3.6.9 using -mstm8 --opt-code-speed --max-allocs-per-node 10000):

stdcbench 0.2
stdcbench c90base score: 6
stdcbench c90lib score: 6
stdcbench final score: 12

stdcbench already seems quite reasonable for benchmarking integer
performance. However, there is still work to do:

1) Come up with module(s) for floating-point performance. What matters
for embedded systems? How should correctness be verified for floating-point?
2) Find out why the c90lib module hangs on C8051F120 (possible compiler
bug).
3) State run/reporting rules.
4) Benchmark a few interesting systems
6) Create a website or write a paper about the benchmark and the results.

Philipp