From the 'Open Source Compiler' files:

GCC is one of the most important open source applications in use today, enabling developers to compile their programs.

With each incremental GCC release, there always seems to be more speed and stability fixes and that looks to be the case with GCC 4.6 as well.

There are a number of link-time optimization improvements including memory usage and intermediate language streaming performance improvements.



"A new general optimization level, -Ofast , has been

introduced," the GCC 4.6 release notes state. "It combines the existing optimization level -O3

with options that can affect standards compliance but result in

better optimized code. For example, -Ofast enables

-ffast-math ."



Going a step further datastructures used by the dataflow framework in GCC were reorganized

which results in a improved compile

time.