[Raion]

A lot of misinformation about MIPSPro is around and I'm currently on vacation trawling through SGI documentation that exists as well as the manuals for MIPSPro to better document all of the flags and such that it has, as well as clear up some myths I have read online from misinformed users.

These range from MIPSPro not being an optimizing compiler (completely false) to it being marginally slower than GCC, which is unscientifically performed and doesn't tell the full story. It's very unscientific to compare both compilers at a baseline that's unfairly biased against a much older compiler.

In particular, veterans of the MIPSPro compiler know it has a number of very extensive flags as a result of its very specific applications. This includes:

-TARG, which can apply CPU and/or platform specific opts

-O, which behaves somewhat close to GCC on the surface, but doesn't appear to be quite as aggressive at level 3 which can prevent code from getting too big. 

-OPT, which can adjust certain optimizations in a more fine grained fashion.

In particular I've found it's important to leverage these options to get the most out of the compiler. If you don't, you will get less than stellar results. 

I will be distilling much of the documentation down and moving it into the MIPSPro wiki article to better help people make these decisions, and frankly to avoid people who think they know better.

[Raion]

I've added the section to the MIPSPro article that preliminary discusses this. I have decided for the sake of brevity that if there's a need for us to go into further detail to help people out, it may be necessary to break the article out.