> Because the compilers for Sun, HP and IBM a) are faster and b) generate
> faster and tighter code than gcc.  We don't have a license for SUNWspro at
> work anymore, I don't think, but I seem to remember it building things in
> half the time it took gcc to do the same thing, and the default optimizing
> pass put out better code (I could be mis-remembering but I don't
> think so).

on the code quality front.. the 5.0 version of the sun product
compilers did much better than gcc 2.95.2 at building Rijndael
(roughly a factor of two in performance on code which has a lot of
instruction-level parallelism and which presumably is very sensitive
to the quality of instruction scheduling).

					- Bill