Maybe with bad C toolchains you can get combinations of switches that result in dead binaries, but I've never seen a JVM that wouldn't start because of bad tuni

Maybe with bad C toolchains you can get combinations of switches that result in dead binaries, but I've never seen a JVM that wouldn't start because of bad tuning flags. At most you can hurt (or help) performance. I'm not sure the Go 'philosophy' here has anything to do with it. If you click through some links you'll end up at a GitHub issue where they discuss a prototype for making Go's code generation not completely awful. The justification for not pursuing a 5-10% improvement (which is huge for compiler opts) is that it'd break existing inline assembly by changing the calling convention. This isn't a philosophical objection, it's just bad design painting them into a corner.