14.1.5 Program Speed

g77 has the potential to better optimize code than f2c, even when gcc is used to compile the output of f2c, because f2c must necessarily translate Fortran into a somewhat lower-level language (C) that cannot preserve all the information that is potentially useful for optimization, while g77 can gather, preserve, and transmit that information directly to the GBE.

For example, g77 implements ASSIGN and assigned GOTO using direct assignment of pointers to labels and direct jumps to labels, whereas f2c maps the assigned labels to integer values and then uses a C switch statement to encode the assigned GOTO statements.

However, as is typical, theory and reality don't quite match, at least not in all cases, so it is still the case that f2c plus gcc can generate code that is faster than g77.

Version 0.5.18 of g77 offered default settings and options, via patches to the gcc back end, that allow for better program speed, though some of these improvements also affected the performance of programs translated by f2c and then compiled by g77's version of gcc.

Version 0.5.20 of g77 offers further performance improvements, at least one of which (alias analysis) is not generally applicable to f2c (though f2c could presumably be changed to also take advantage of this new capability of the gcc back end, assuming this is made available in an upcoming release of gcc).