Comment by PufPufPuf
8 hours ago
The only time I used -march=native was for a university assignment which was built and evaluated on the same server, and it allowed juicing an extra bit of performance. Using it basically means locking the program to the current CPU only.
However I'm not sure about -O3. I know it can make the binary larger, not sure about other downsides.
> The only time I used -march=native
It is completely fine to use -march=native, just do not make it the default for someone building your project.
That should always be something to opt-in.
The main reason is that software are a composite of (many) components. It becomes quickly a pain in the ass of maintainability if any tiny library somewhere try to sneak in '-march=native' that will make the final binary randomly crash with an illegal instruction error if executed on any CPU that is not exactly the same than the host.
When you design a build system configuration, think for the others first (the users of your software), and yourself after.
If you have a lot of "data plane" code or other looping over data, you can see a big gain from -O3 because of more aggressive unrolling and vectorization (HPC people use -O3 quite a lot). CRUD-like applications and other things that are branchy and heavy on control flow will often see a mild performance regression from use of -O3 compared to -O2 because of more frequent frequency hits due to AVX instructions and larger binary size.
-O3 also makes build times longer (sometimes significantly), and occasionally the resulting program is actually slightly slower than -O2.
IME -O3 should only be used if you have benchmarks that show -O3 actually produces a speedup for your specific codebase.