[ArkyBeagle]

In the large, no, they don't care about the 90-95% of the code base that's not performance critical. And these days, the stuff that is critical will be #ifdef and asm(...) stew.

I can't tell you how many projects I have been on where disabling optimization made no measurable difference in performance.

This being said, I cannot speak for game devs nor video device driver developers.

[E6300]

I have to say, I have never encountered a program where compiling without optimizations made no difference. If you have seen that, then I would agree that C was a very, very poor choice for that particular domain.

[ArkyBeagle]

It made no measurable difference. The acceptance criteria for the system were not materially affected. Since the optimization did not improve the performance by that, it was generally set one way ( mostly off ) and let that way.

Teams I'm on have written some tight - but readable -code, too. Well-architected, low-latency, low-jitter.

[pjmlp]

Business applications, as it was common in the 90's.

Witting them in C or VB made no difference for the guys sitting at the desk.

[ArkyBeagle]

This ranged from networking equipment to phone switches to equipment control. Most of it was bare metal.

I've never written a business application in my life.

[adrianN]

You can try an experiment and build an application like Firefox from source with disabled optimizations. I bet you'll notice a massive difference.

Even more important are things that run in datacenters on thousands and thousands of machines. Even if you suppose that optimizations make only a minuscule difference on the scale of today's infrastructure 5% fewer machines can save huge amounts of electricity.

[ArkyBeagle]

Why would I want to build Firefox from source? I don't build things that run on thousands of machines. Last thing I ran any code on had a 2500 HP diesel; the electronics were in the noise.