" Yet, despite that complexity, we need answers to important questions about modern, large-scale software. What sort of important questions? Well, consider the GNU Compiler Collection. I write articles that benchmark code generation, a task fraught with difficulties due to the myriad options provided by different compilers. For my benchmarks to have any meaning, I need to know which combination of options produces the fastest code for a given application."

I thought we already knew, the answer is "42", of course we would have to build a computer the size of earth to test it...