Last I saw, it generates crappy code, with lots more jumps back and forth,
and the image just blows up.
There's a reason we use -Os, and that's that small footprint I$ is
generally more important than fake compiler optimizations that don't
actually help except on microbenchmarks where everything fits in the
cache.
Taking a branch instruction from two bytes to five is almost always a
mistake, unless you *know* that the code it jumps to will effectively
never be done at all (which is not necessarily the case at all). It also
makes debugging much nastier, because if now things like backtraces
probably look like crap too!
Don't go there. The *best* we can do is to just use the optimizations that
generate good-looking code that humans can read. The rest is just compiler
masturbation.
Linus
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