It is, honestly, the dumbest of the -O flag option, which is why I picked it. I’m sure there are times when it’s useful, but it’s nearly never the right choice.
As someone who has worked on embedded systems for the past 30 years: It used to be a real big deal, but for the past 10-15 years it hasn’t. We now have fully fledged multi core systems running everything. Even small embedded sensors or actuation controllers are 100+ MHz microcontrollers with oodles of flash and ram.
Now there has been an interesting turnaround with the whole chip shortage for the past years. All the young folk are at a loss, being used to just putting powerful chips all around willy-nilly. So they turn to the old folk like me to figure out designs with less chips, running busses all over and connecting dumb sensors/actuators to a central processing unit.
You’re probably using the wrong compiler flags, did you remember
-Wall -Oz -nostdlib?TIL
It is, honestly, the dumbest of the
-Oflag option, which is why I picked it. I’m sure there are times when it’s useful, but it’s nearly never the right choice.Wasm comes to mind, execution time in the browser will probably be ok, but size is a big deal
Software that runs on embedded systems usually benefits from being small, too.
As someone who has worked on embedded systems for the past 30 years: It used to be a real big deal, but for the past 10-15 years it hasn’t. We now have fully fledged multi core systems running everything. Even small embedded sensors or actuation controllers are 100+ MHz microcontrollers with oodles of flash and ram.
Now there has been an interesting turnaround with the whole chip shortage for the past years. All the young folk are at a loss, being used to just putting powerful chips all around willy-nilly. So they turn to the old folk like me to figure out designs with less chips, running busses all over and connecting dumb sensors/actuators to a central processing unit.