This is definitely wrong :) Besides Richard, who is the code owner of the clang frontend , chandler is the #5 contributor to LLVM (see here https://github.com/

This is definitely wrong :) Besides Richard, who is the code owner of the clang frontend , chandler is the #5 contributor to LLVM (see here https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/graphs/contributors https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/graphs/contributors), and a quick trip to llvm-dev will tell you how much time he spends working on optimizations :) FWIW: The GCC folks i pinged were similarly unenamored with the idea of trying to elide allocation all the time. Personally, i've seen a bunch of these "required optimizations" over the years, and they rarely pan out without significant help. (IE required tail call optimization usually requires special marking/calling convention change, etc). Full disclosure: Chandler, Geoff, and Richard are in my org, and i am theoretically their boss's boss. I say theoretically because it's pretty meaningless - i'm not going to tell Richard how to do C++.