stdcbench

Abstract

Benchmark programs are useful for measuring performance. Benchmarks written in C effectively benchmark the performance of a C implementation consisting of hardware, compiler and standard library. For small systems (i.e. systems with just a few KB of memory) three well-known and widely used benchmarks are Whetstone, Dhrystone and Coremark. However, all three have their shortcomings. Whetstone scores depend heavily on the performance of floating-point functions from the standard library. Dhrystone scores depend heavily on the performance of just a few string processing functions from the standard library. Coremark intentionally avoids using the standard library and the scores heavily depend on the performance of matrix multiplications. All three thus highly depend on a single aspect of the C implementation each, so that optimizations targeting that aspect have a huge effect on scores. stdcbench is a benchmark for small systems that tries to give a more balanced reflection of performance. It is intended to be usable for a wide range of C implementations for small systems. We present the design of stdcbench, and discuss a few benchmark results also in comparison to Dhrystone and Coremark.