A while ago, I became interested in reducing my compile times, and examined various methods for this.
This blog post is about enabling all compiler options that I believe can make gcc faster when compiling code, and measuring the gains I got as a result.
How to Build It
mkdir build-gcc16
cd build-gcc16

../gcc-16.1.0/configure \
  --prefix="$HOME/opt/gcc16-super" \
  --program-prefix=super- \
  --enable-languages=c,c++ \
  --disable-multilib \
  --with-build-config='bootstrap-native bootstrap-lto bootstrap-O3'

make profiledbootstrap -j$(nproc)
make install-strip
Expect to be waiting for a while on make profiledbootstrap.
It took 72 minutes of wall time on my laptop (AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395, 16c/32t, -j32).

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A hands-on guide to building a host-tuned GCC 16 that compiles code faster by combining three key optimizations: native CPU targeting (bootstrap-native), O3 optimization level, and profile-guided optimization (PGO) via the profiledbootstrap make target. Benchmarks across four real-world codebases (GCC itself, binutils, SDL, CPython) show 12–24% compile time improvements over an Arch Linux distro GCC that already uses LTO. The build takes ~72 minutes on a 16-core machine but yields a persistent speedup for all future compilations.

Building a Host-Tuned GCC to Make GCC Compile Faster