Comment by pavpanchekha

Fun fact: when working on Herbie (http://herbie.uwplse.org), our automated tool for reducing floating-point error by rearranging your mathematical expressions, we found that fast-math often undid Herbie's improvements. In a sense, Herbie and fast-math are opposites: one makes code more accurate (sometimes slower, sometimes faster), while the other makes code faster (sometimes less accurate, sometimes more).