A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

Every day we are bitten by the fact that because it makes sense for performance reasons for the Intel compilers to be the default, they are the default on our clusters. The number of packages that are written not in C, C++ or Fortran but gcc, g++, gfortran is astounding.

It makes me think that in some future iteration of our standard environment, maybe GCC should be the default.

This would also have the advantage of decoupling us so much from Intel as a chip vendor.

I can't personally think of any reason to use ICC other than it producing marginally better performance than GCC/G++ on Intel chips. Intel themselves even seem to acknowledge it, as VTune can just as happily profile code compiled with GCC, G++ or MSVC.

It can give dramatic performance benefits with some scientific code. But I'm not sure it's worth the hassle it causes, for example, when users pip install things and it tries to use the Intel compiler to build embedded C/Fortran and gets in a mess.