OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Eyeing LTO By Default; GCC 9 Optimization Work Thanks To Firefox

Longtime GCC developer Honza HubiAka of SUSE has posted a lengthy and quite interesting blog post concerning some of the optimization work that went into the now-released GCC 9 compiler. It turns out some of the GCC 9 optimization work was motivated by the Firefox developers and their desire to switch to LLVM Clang in the name of performance. Separately, openSUSE Tumbleweed has been looking at using link-time optimizations (LTO) by default for their packages and that has also motivated developers and help ensured the LTO support was in good shape for this annual compiler release...