How to use Intel C++ Compiler with Qt Creator

Question

I am writing a program wherein i will need to do a stupendous number of numerical calculations. But since I am developing the front end of the program in Qt Creator, I have as yet been dealing with MinGW.

As such, is there any way to integrate or use the Intel C++ Compiler with QT Creator?

Currently using IC++ 11.0 and QtCreator 1.2.1

Answer 1

I think so but you need to rebuild / reconfigure Qt Creator as documented in the Deploying an Application on Windows section. And looking into the mkspecs directory, I see 'win32-icc' which is probably what you need.

Edit: To clarify, you may need the whole 'SDK' rather than just the creator, and you need to then re-configure Qt within qt/ directoty of the SDK file tree using

configure -platform win32-icc

plus whatever other options you may need. It also takes a little while to build this, and as icc isn't know for its compilation speed you may want to give this a couple of hours to a day.

Answer 2

If you're concerned about compiler performance for some of your code but want to use a development tool that doesn't integrate with your desired compiler, isn't the saner answer to use the Intel compiler to generate a DLL called by your Qt program?

And as with all performance question: have you benchmarked your code to be sure that the compiler optimization is actually the limit? Have you investigated other options, like a hardware upgrade or some targetted assembly code? Whacking at an unmeasured performance problem by changing tools usually just leads to wasted work.