[spongebobism]

That's fascinating. I'd imagine there are actually two equilibria/stable states possible under this rule: a small codebase with only the most effective optimization passes, or a large codebase that incorporates pretty much any optimization pass.

A marginally useful optimization pass would not pull its weight when added to the first code base, but could in the second code base because it would optimize the run time spent on all the other marginal optimizations.

Though the compiler would start out closer to the small equilibrium in its initial version, and there might not be a way to incrementally move towards the large equilibrium from there under Wirth's rule.