Well, of course if you compare it to Open Watcom the difference isn't so huge, but anyways, as you said,
It's 5 minutes in OpenWatcom BUT if you have: "A pentium 4 (dual-core) 3.2 GHz CPU and 2 gbyte RAM".
Most of us don't have that processing power
BTW, comparing your benchmarks and the benchmarks made by wxHatch, seems to have almost the same ratio:
Time to compile in debug build wxWidgets 2.5.3:
GCC 3.2: 47:14 minutes
Open Watcom 1.3: 16:04 minutes
Digital Mars: 2:34 minutes
So, the ratio for GCC vs. Open Watcom is 3:1
and the ratio for GCC vs. Digital Mars is 20:1 :shock:
It wouldn't be illogical then, to think that you can compile with your HIGH spec pc, the complete wxWidgets library using DMars in
45 seconds.
Better not to talk about the optimizations of Open Watcom. GCC is very good though (lower is better, in milliseconds):
Open Watcom 1.1 DEBUG: 11922 ms
Open Watcom 1.1 RELEASE: 6578 ms
GCC 3.2 RELEASE: 2031 ms
DMars DEBUG: 3812 ms
You can see DMars in DEBUG mode outperforms Open Watcom even in RELEASE mode.
About the debugger, DMars works with Symantec, Zortech, Rational Systems, Multiscope, and Microsoft debuggers (dunno about GDB).
Anyways there will be a point (hopefully) when you probably rarely need a debugger (I know that there are people that doesn't debuggers anymore)
The more compilers (that support the standards) the better