Actually, that's pretty much accurate. I initially didn't even realise this was written by ESR and just assumed the author was very inexperienced. ESR however should know better, though to be honest I don't even know if the guy still writes code. I hate to stoop to ad hominem attacks, but re-reading it knowing that it's him I get the impression this was a petty reaction to some feud with a GCC dev. In any case I'd love to know who the hell is upvoting this "story".
Yes, when I started reading, my first thought was, "wow, sounds like someone pretty inexperienced." After I noticed it was written by ESR, that changed to, "wow, sounds like someone pretty arrogant."
The fact of the matter is that a compiler like gcc is used by thousands (tens of thousands? more?) of people almost daily. Usually you have to be doing some pretty crazy stuff to find a bug in it. Bugs that go away when you turn off optimizations are usually either race-condition or memory-access related.
Or uninitialised local variables, which are affected by the difference in register allocation, but really you should be enabling the corresponding warning.
