Ever since the plugin branch landed in GCC, I have been itching to explore the application-specific optimization space that it opens up. It’s really hard to optimize code in the general case, but it’s relatively easy to optimize for something for specific use-cases. We can rely on API-specific static analysis in order to get rid of the API-imposed overheads at compile time. Let me repeat, we can get rid of some API-induced suck (OO frameworks usually have a lot of it) without sacrificing any of the benefits.
Unfortunally, I got busy working on, supposedly, more important stuff such as making Firefox startup quicker, so my de-error-handling and de-virtualizer (basically possible with LTO, but we can prove that certain classes will never be overloaded via dynamic linking) ideas had to be put on indefinite hold. Luckily, one of David Humphrey’s students decided to take on the first task, see his blog post here. I’m really psyched about this, few things that are cooler than cross-project open source work involving the most important open source projects of our time 