Your typical helloWorld.c is several hundred thousand lines of code - most of that is things like "#include <stdio.h>" which gcc has to parse the whole thing ev

Your typical helloWorld.c is several hundred thousand lines of code - most of that is things like "#include <stdio.h>" which gcc has to parse the whole thing even though wc only shows the program is less than 10 lines. We can make Gcc much faster despite the above. However your code will be slow. Each optimization adds a little more time. Even at zero optimization the compiler is still doing things to not generate stupid code. Gcc is extremely complex, and they are often willing to compromise runtime performance for either faster code, or easier maintainability - the right compromise for them, but it means the compiler is slower than it could be.