I've run some of the shootout tests with disabled optimizations and found some surprising results: Pike: pike PikeNP: pike -dp (without peephole optimization) PikeNT: pike -dt (without tail recursion) PikeNTP: pike -dp -dt
Pike PikeNP PikeNT PikeNTP 1: 42.81 32.83 37.49 34.75 (ackermann) 2: 34.92 37.05 37.64 37.80 (ary3) 3: 148.92 304.90 118.21 128.94 (fibo)
Is the test flawed or is there something fishy in the optimization. The compilation overhead between Pike with and without optimizations is at most 0.13s.