I asked the engineer for a response: "For reference, I used -O6 because it's a historical convention (more of a joke, really) for "optimize the crap out of it".

I asked the engineer for a response: "For reference, I used -O6 because it's a historical convention (more of a joke, really) for "optimize the crap out of it". UNIX geeks have been using -O6 in this way for about 30 years."