[convolvatron]

there's tenuous and difficult to reason about optimizations and then there's removing all of the completely useless loads and stores of intermediate results that occurs in the default simplistic translation.

i might be with you on the former, but that first pass really cuts down on executable (icache) size, nets a huge performance win and actually makes the generated code alot easier to read.

some of those analyses can get pretty involved. but i dont think we should be discouraging people from investigating them - or from providing nice safe defaults and flags to turn them on.

one other speed-independent factor here is that like you I usually start without any optimizations. and usually when I turn it on I find a few bugs in my own code right away. thats pretty helpful.