Joost Yervante Damad wrote:
> Reading up on this, I don't think using -fPIC on amd64 has a performance 
> penalty since it has the %rip register. Also it appears that gcc by default 
> uses indirect addressing via %rip in the generated asm.

I did some benchmarks when switching the ocamlopt AMD64 code generator 
to generate PIC code by default (in order to support Dynlink on native 
code): the slowdown was indeed very small (in the order of a few percent 
for micro benchmarks). Modern processors seem very good for optimizing 
indirect calls.


Alain