-Ofast enables unsafe floating-point optimizations that might give a performance boost for applications which don't need strict compliance. For example, FP oper

-Ofast enables unsafe floating-point optimizations that might give a performance boost for applications which don't need strict compliance. For example, FP operations cannot be optimized by using the association rule due to various concerns, but -Ofast enables -fassociative-math and allows such optimization. If your program just computes a bunch of numbers and doesn't rely on some uncommon features such as NaN or signed zero, it would only slightly change the last irrelevant few significant digits of the result, and greatly speed up your program. But the general rule-of-thumb is that -Ofast should not be used, unless you know what the program is doing and how the optimization affects it. A more meaningful comparison is -O2 vs. -O3 vs. -O3 -march=native -mtune=broadwell. Or run the OpenJDK test suite with -Ofast and see whether there are failed tests.