Runtime statistics

["Crazy Diamond" <sydbarrett at home dot com>]

Does GCC have any facilities to collect runtime information (such as branching statistics) that can be applied to future compilations?  If not, has anyone expressed any interest in adding it?  This is something that could allow us to squeeze a few % more speed from executables.  The best thing to do would be to make this part of the debug/symbol information, so that it can be stripped from final compiles (once the info has been used).  We don't want .exe's being larger than they have to be.