EKOPath 4 is a high performance compiler suite that had until now been a commercial offering by PathScale, and for a large sum of $1795 nonetheless. Now PathScale has announced that they will make the sources of this compiler suite available for free under the GPL3 license.
PathScale Chief Scientist, Fred Chow says, “This is an exciting announcement because it allows PathScale’s world-class compilers to be accessible to a much larger community of compiler users. The enlarged user base will benefit PathScale, and in turn promote more community participation in the continued development of PathScale’s products.”
And an exciting announcement this surely is, as their compiler suite is way ahead of current open source compilers such as GCC, LLVM etc. Like GCC though, the EKOPath compiler too has been developed released under the GPL3 licence.
According to benchmarks conducted by the Phoronix, experts at benchmarking, and the creators of the open source benchmarking framework Phoronix Test Suite, the compiler brings impressive performance benefits. According to them it is possible to compile the Linux kernel too using this compiler, after some minor patching.
This is certainly good news for the Linux ecosystem and open source in general, as it stands to bring a huge boost in performance to large number of open source software. Previously, due to the high price of this compiler, it would only have been possible for larger companies to afford the benefits of this high performance compiler. Linux is about to get a lot more interesting.