Happened to continue my browsing for compiler history and found also this interesting rationale for a new version of the Dhrystone benchmark from 1988 where the

Happened to continue my browsing for compiler history and found also this interesting rationale for a new version of the Dhrystone benchmark from 1988 where they say that the previous version was too badly broken by optimizing compilers: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/47907.47911 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/47907.47911 The languages are interesting as well (versions for C, Pascal and Ada). So this places the wide use of optimizing compilers earlier than the 16MB era, 1988 was sub-1 MB era for personal computers, VAX class minis might have had 16 MB (but in multiuser context, compilers probably wouldn't use nearly that much memory) But of course the later Dhrystone was also later broken by improved compiler optimizations, supporting the notion that compilers did keep improving as well. Also as another tangent, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Common_Lisp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Common_Lisp the CMUCL Python compiler (famous for its optimizations) was started in 1985 and had to be fairly good at optimizing already by the mid-90s 16MB era. I found some release notes from 1993 that talk about optimizations: https://trac.common-lisp.net/cmucl/wiki/Release17c https://trac.common-lisp.net/cmucl/wiki/Release17c (summarized as "Improvements in compiler source-level optimization, inline expansion and instruction scheduling")