[nwlieb]

Is this a 1-1 comparison? If the ARM compile is compiling to ARM binaries then there might be less work/optimizations since it is a newer architecture. Seems like a test with two variables that changed. Would be interesting to see them both cross-compile to their respective opposite archs.

[mlyle]

Maybe not, but A) it's close-- most of the work of compiling is not microarchitecture-level optimizations or emitting code, and B) if you're a developer, even if some of the advantage is being on an architecture that it's easier to emit code for... that's still a benefit you realize.

It's worth noting that cross-compiling is definitely harder in many ways, because you can't always evaluate constant expressions easily at compile-time in the same way your runtime code will, etc, too, and have to jump through hoops.

[throwaway894345]

As someone who knows relatively little about this, I'm very curious why this is downvoted. It seems like a rebuttal would be enlightening.

[marmaduke]

Hm my experience was that compiling C on arm was always super fast compared to x86, because the latter had much more work to do.

[fomine3]

So cross compile for RISC-V, POWER, or something else would be fair?

[attractivechaos]

Apple has been optimizing the compiler for a decade for iOS.

[freehunter]

If everything else is the same, that seems like a solid reason to prefer the ARM architecture even setting aside 1:1 comparisons. Isn't faster compilation and execution the whole point of a faster processor?

[kag0]

The assertion is that compilation might be faster since there are fewer optimizations, and therefore runtime would be slower.