bug#38322: GCC optimize levels makes huge impact on performance

[Paul Eggert]

On 11/22/19 8:00 AM, Balázs Vinarz wrote:
> Would you mind change the default optimize level on the make
> configuration? Did somebody ever measured the benefits using different
> GCC optimalization levels?

Lots of measurements have been done. They often disagree. Even if grep 
changed the default optimization level (which I'm not sure is a good 
idea), distros like Ubuntu often override the default and if so, changes 
to the default wouldn't help you.

> I know that this is a special use case, but the improvement is huge.
> I'm looking forward for your feedback.

It sounds like you're using grep to do set subtraction; is this a 
common-enough usage to be worth special-casing grep for? (One could 
argue that it's easy enough to do set subtraction with Awk or Python or 
whatever....) If we do want to tune grep for set-like operations, that 
suggests doing some surgery to its internals rather than merely fiddling 
with -O flags.