[apw]

Thank you for your comment. Very interesting points.

Isn't it wrong to say "compiled their C code at the lowest optimization level" though? As I read the paper, they compiled their C code at -O2. It's hard to work backwards in time to know exactly what that meant when they published their paper, but I suspect it meant something very similar to the current gcc definition:

-O2 Perform nearly all supported optimizations that do not involve a space-speed tradeoff.