It does damage it actually. GCC currently generates slightly pessimised code when frame pointers are enabled, for example always using the frame pointer to acc

It does damage it actually. GCC currently generates slightly pessimised code when frame pointers are enabled, for example always using the frame pointer to access stack variables even if it knows the offset from the stack pointer. I guess this is simply because distributions were all using -fomit-frame-pointer so the frame pointer case was neglected. Hopefully this will improve now that most distros have switched to enabling frame pointers.