This comparison is pretty misleading. An accessibility issue prevents someone from being able to use software effectively. Not having localized text would have a similar impact. A ~1% performance impact on the other hand is the minuscule downside of improving debugging, profiling and error reporting for an entire OS. And that's not just a minority of users, as tons of software will automatically gather stack traces for bug reports.
There's basically no downside to fixing accessibility issues or adding new language translations other than the work involved in doing so. (And yes, maintaining translations over time is hard, but most projects let them lag during development, so they don't directly hold anything back.) There is a rather glaring downside to this performance optimization, whose upside is sometimes entirely within run-to-run variance and can be blown away by almost any other performance tweak. It's clear the optimization has some upsides, but an extra register and saving some trivial loads/stores just isn't as big of a deal on modern processors that are loaded to the gills with huge caches and deep pipelines.
I guess I don't care that much about fomit-frame-pointer in the grand scheme of things, but I think enabling it in distributions was ultimately a mistake. If some software packages benefited enough from it, it could've just been done only for those packages. Doing it across the system is questionable at best...
There's basically no downside to fixing accessibility issues or adding new language translations other than the work involved in doing so. (And yes, maintaining translations over time is hard, but most projects let them lag during development, so they don't directly hold anything back.) There is a rather glaring downside to this performance optimization, whose upside is sometimes entirely within run-to-run variance and can be blown away by almost any other performance tweak. It's clear the optimization has some upsides, but an extra register and saving some trivial loads/stores just isn't as big of a deal on modern processors that are loaded to the gills with huge caches and deep pipelines.
I guess I don't care that much about fomit-frame-pointer in the grand scheme of things, but I think enabling it in distributions was ultimately a mistake. If some software packages benefited enough from it, it could've just been done only for those packages. Doing it across the system is questionable at best...