I like to think of frugality as something akin to adding the the "-O2" argument to $CFLAGS. It isn't going to undo fundamentally bad life choices, it won't make

I like to think of frugality as something akin to adding the the "-O2" argument to $CFLAGS. It isn't going to undo fundamentally bad life choices, it won't make much difference if your code is already written in inline assembly, it might help you meet requirements if you were on the edge, it might not be a terrible idea to turn it on when you're building the release binary.