[kaba0]

I never really understood this reasoning. To me the ideal thing would be a fast debug-compile mode that barely optimizes and a don’t care how slow release mode that uses every possible optimization for the end result.

Rust is plenty interactive with its similar mode of working. Incremental builds are fast.

[astrange]

I am a performance engineer and recommend against this. Optimizations don't really work that well on their own; to get performance you want an ongoing conversation between yourself and the compiler, which you don't get if the compile time is super long.

If you do have a really long running superoptimizer discovering things, then you'd want a way to write that back into the code so you don't need to discover it again.

Also, most of your program should be at -Os because it's not hot code and the important thing is to stop it from disturbing the fast parts. (Or because the aggressive optimizations actually make it slower. Totally possible with fancy ones like autovectorization.)