Re: -O2 or -O3 ?

[Jeff Noxon <jeff@router.patch.net>]

> > Does anyone disagree with Brian White ?  If not I'll change the
> > guidelines back to recommending -O2.
> 
> I don't disagree with Brian but am not sure he's adequately proven his
> point.  He's only told us about what he found when compiling afio.
> 
> Wouldn't it be wise to compare -O2 to -O3 on several (larger) packages
> before the guidelines are modified?

I think function inlining is something that should be done only for
performance-critical applications.  The average debian package doesn't
fit into that category.

If you -O3 everything, you'll get bigger executables, you'll need
more memory to run them in, and you'll need bigger hard drives to store
them on.  I wouldn't be surprised at all if they actually ran *slower*
because more memory was being eaten up by useless inlining.

People with 4MB and 8MB machines have the most to lose here.

Let's save -O3 for packages that can benefit from it, like X servers and
math applications.

Jeff