Linktime optimization in GCC, part 2 - Firefox

This time I will write about building Firefox with LTO. Firefox is one of largest binaries on my hard drive (beaten only by Chromium) so it is an excellent stress test. Taras Glek and I started to work on getting Firefox to build well in 2009 (see original paper from 2010), however for all those years I was mostly chasing correctness and compile time/memory usage issues. Markus Trippelsdorf was instrumental to keep the project going. In parallel Rafael Espindola did same effort of getting Firefox to work with LLVM and LTO

Linktime optimization in GCC, part 1 - brief history

Link-time optimization (LTO) is one of the most actively developed features of GCC.
Since 2010, I am working on getting LTO to work well with real world applications and with GCC-4.9 release candidate out, perhaps it is a good time to share my experiences.

I plan to write about getting Firefox (Update: part 2 is here), Libreoffice, Chromium and other large applications to work with LTO. This will hopefully give an broader idea what kind of setup & portability issues one can hit. I will also show some benchmarks. Today I will however start with a short review of history and current status of implementation of link-time optimizations in GCC.

Devirtualization in C++, part 5 (feedback driven devirtualization)

After a break, I finally have time to return to the devirtualization series. Last time I was speaking about speculative devirtualization performed by static analysis of the type inheritance graph. This time I plan to speak about simple (but very effective) feedback directed devirtualization. While GCC implements basic feedback directed  devirtualization since 2003, GCC 4.9 will newly make this cross-module. I also finally show some statistics how effective the described optimizations are.