A few days ago, GG finally had some time to look into a couple of Andrew's email about Optimization, CFLAGS, and autovectorization.

The subject "speeding up Cin-GG" through use of some of the aforementioned techniques would make a great PHD thesis or dissertation (so Andrew is already half-way there!).

A summary of GG's feedback is:

1) It would be beneficial to improve the speed, and especially those of the most used plugins.

2) He is concerned that a lot of the speed up potential is too "hardware architecture specific".  (We use mostly AMD here rather than the other vendor).

3) For one of his tests, he modified some of the recommended CFLAGS and saw no improvement for him personally; but keep in mind that we always run in debug mode so that we are always prepared for a crash while testing.  Running in user mode will more than likely see useful improvements.

It would be very time-consuming to check speed-up improvements for all of the different Operating Systems - probably best left to individual users on their specific hardware/software.  Maybe some day.