Hmm, I'm only a lurker, but that looks *very* suspect to me. Some compilers may choose to reorder even without optimization turned on. I'd say that it is a bug in Parrot if it requires optimization to be off for this code - how many different compilers have you tried?
That doesn't make this per-C-file-cc-option-tweaking necessarily unuseful. Perl 5 uses something similar, because the lexer is sometimes miscompiled when some compilers with a high optimization level. Example : see the hints files and lookup "XXX_cflags" or "toke_cflags" in hints/README.hints.
I'm not saying it isn't useful - per compiler workarounds for brokenness is one thing, but the implication was that this tweakage was needed for *all* compilers for those particular files, which spells 'broken' in my book. If the code makes assumptions about execution order without using the necessary mutexes/cvs to enforce these assumptions, it is very unlikely to work on large SMP machines, for example.
-- Alan Burlison --
