[Vm-dev] [commit][3753] Do not use -O3 optimization, -O2 is safer and works well.

Holger Freyther holger at freyther.de
Fri Dec 23 21:52:11 UTC 2016


> On 23 Dec 2016, at 22:30, Andres Valloud <avalloud at smalltalk.comcastbiz.net> wrote:
> 
> Compiler manuals usually state -O3 and higher do not preserve language semantics.  It's going to be hard to prove "bug" in the non-default presence of a switch known to potentially produce undefined behavior.

Where did you get that from? I tried reading it up but don't see anything.


Clang:

-O3 Like -O2, except that it enables optimizations that take longer to perform or that may generate larger code (in an attempt to make the program run faster).

=> so longer compilation time, bigger binary



gcc:

-O3
Optimize yet more.  -O3 turns on all optimizations specified by -O2 and also turns on the -finline-functions, -funswitch-loops, -fpredictive-commoning, -fgcse-after-reload, -ftree-loop-vectorize, -ftree-loop-distribute-patterns, -fsplit-paths -ftree-slp-vectorize, -fvect-cost-model, -ftree-partial-pre, -fpeel-loops and -fipa-cp-clone options. 

=> None says that the language standard is broken



Intel ICC

-O3

Performs O2 optimizations and enables more aggressive loop transformations such as Fusion, Block-Unroll-and-Jam, and collapsing IF statements. The O3 optimizations may not cause higher performance unless loop and memory access transformations take place. The optimizations may slow down code in some cases compared to O2 optimizations. The O3 option is recommended for applications that have loops that heavily use floating-point calculations and process large data sets.



So both Intel ICC an GCC start doing more auto vectorization with -O3. Nothing of that is breaking the language semantic. So in most cases if -O3 breaks things.. the code has undefined behavior...


holger




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