An issue for the SC: horrible documentation quality of GCC

[Richard Kenner]

    I guess that for every such heuristic you will with some care find an
    example where it does a stupidity. In general it makes more sense to
    have a few passes with really good heuristics than have some lame
    heuristic in every pass.

No, all should be good!  The strength of GCC is that it does optimization
everywhere.  We should not sacrifice that. 

    As for the speed -- I guess this is just a matter of opinion, as there
    is nothing to compare. My opinion is that the increased speed of most
    of the passes would pay up for the decreased speed of a few cleanup
    passes (they must be in some form present anyway, they already must
    gather all the data, so the slowdown should not be that dramatic).

Increased over what?  Why does a heuristic slow things down?