Comment by foxfluff

I haven't got the time to read the paper yet but I believe I'd emerge with the more or less the same opinion that I've had before: nobody's forcing you to pass -O2 or -O3. It's stupid to ask the compiler to optimize and then whine that it optimizes. I usually am OK with the compiler optimizing, hence I ask it to do so. I'm glad that others who disagree can selectively enable or disable only the optimizations they're concerned about. Most of the optimizations that people whine about seem quite sane to me. Of course, sometimes you find real bugs in the optimizer (yesterday someone on libera/#c posted a snippet where gcc with -O2 (-fdelete-null-pointer-checks) removes completely legit checks)