Now, because this article got a little long, as per a friend’s suggestion, here’s a table of contents:
Optimization gives us optimal programs
Branch weights and the CPU’s branch predictor
-O3 produces much faster code than -O2
Javascript interpreters JIT at runtime because they don’t know which paths are hot ahead of time
If you have a compiler, you don’t need an interpreter
The middle-end is target/platform-independent
The compiler optimizes for data locality
-O0 gives you fast compilation
Templates are slow to compile
Separate compilation is always worth it
Why does link-time optimization (LTO) happen at link-time?
Inlining is useful primarily because it eliminates a call instruction
The role of the inline keyword
The best production compiler to study is LLVM
Undefined behavior only enables optimizations
The compiler can “simply” define undefined behavior 99% correctness rate is ok
Can you elaborate?