Having virtually no experience with gcc, I'm amazed at the quality of the code generated by one vendor's version of it. I've found the code to be quite poor. When I told it to kick up the opimization, supposedly selecting an optimization to improve both speed and code size, the code was four times larger! I've also gotten error messages that are completely unrelated to the real problem and seemingly spurious error indications for which a cause cannot be found.
Is all this typical or common of other gcc's?
In looking at the 25 pages of compiler options in the user manual supplied and considering the results of using the compiler, I wonder if the Gnu people have added so many whistles and bells that they've lost sight of the main objective of a compiler.