The difference between a compiler not optimizing (gcc -O0) and optimizing as good as possible (gcc -O3) can be an order of magnitude of performance. That does m

The difference between a compiler not optimizing (gcc -O0) and optimizing as good as possible (gcc -O3) can be an order of magnitude of performance. That does matter in many cases. Of course, various programs (web apps) are IO-bound. And gcc -O0 should still outperform Python/Ruby/etc.