Stroller wrote:
[...]
To be honest, I am surprised this notion of "optimised executables" has
stuck around long enough that you've heard it, but it's an old joke to
many of us who were around in 2004.
But AFAIK, it *was* faster because Gentoo used the egcs fork of GCC
which did produce faster code. This was probably the origin of the
"Gentoo performance" thingy. It was true. Wikipedia also notes this,
and further states that the name "Gentoo" was chosen (previously it was
"Enoch") because of this speed difference between Gentoo and other
Distros ("the Gentoo species is the fastest swimming penguin").
Soon after though, egcs merged back to gcc and all other distros became
just as fast. So "it was good while it lasted". But this "Gentoo
performance" cliché seems to stick around till today.
