Open Source Summit + ELC North America 2019

Compilers toolchains are at the core of the building the Embedded Linux Systems, it affects the full system from bootloaders, kernels to applications and platform software, compilers are software too, therefore knowing about how this can help to achieve code size, performance optimization is quite powerful insight to have for programming the systems. There are optimizations which are effective in embedded systems, provided by compilers via command line, but there is another class of coding practices, that can help the compiler to generate best code for a given algorithms, modern compilers are quite good at optimizing general code, however this can be made more effective by knowing these practices and help the compiler to compile to generate better code. Knowing the compiler can add that extra edge to programming techniques which can result is effective code. Clang and gcc are primary compilers for linux systems, so knowing the options to generate smaller, better code is the goal.