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A quick remark: general purpose compilers (including all the common ones) aren't really built for "extreme" performance. They always pick big tradeoffs and don't try everything they could.

In other words, it is not "hard" to build compilers with better performance. What is hard is getting performance without build times exploding.

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Just curious: which compilers according to your statement are designed for extreme performance? I know at the very right of the compilation time/performance axis lies SAT-based "super optimizers", but what lies between super optimizers and general-purpose compilers like icc?

For example, Unison is an alternative code generator for LLVM, which uses constraint programming to do combined register allocation and instruction selection. It is very slow, but it does generate optimal (not just improved!) code, within its performance model.

http://unison-code.github.io/

Thanks for the information. It seems that it is a super optimizer[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superoptimization

Unison is not a superoptimizer. Superoptimizer is evem slower.

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