Comment by galangalalgol

Since anything/0 = infinity, these kinds of things always depend upon what programs do and as a sibling comment correctly observes how much they interfere with SIMD autovectorization and sevral other things.

That said, as a rough guideline, nim c -d=release can certainly be almost the same speed as -d=danger and is often within a few (single digits) percent. E.g.:

    .../bu(main)$ nim c -d=useMalloc --panics=on --cc=clang -d=release -o=/t/rel unfold.nim
    Hint: mm: orc; opt: speed; options: -d:release
    61608 lines; 0.976s; 140.723MiB peakmem; proj: .../bu/unfold.nim; out: /t/rel [SuccessX]
    .../bu(main)$ nim c -d=useMalloc --panics=on --cc=clang -d=danger -o=/t/dan unfold.nim
    Hint: mm: orc; opt: speed; options: -d:danger
    61608 lines; 2.705s; 141.629MiB peakmem; proj: .../bu/unfold.nim; out: /t/dan [SuccessX]
    .../bu(main)$ seq 1 100000 > /t/dat
    .../bu(main)$ /t
    /t$ re=(chrt 99 taskset -c 2 env -i HOME=$HOME PATH=$PATH)
    /t$ $re tim "./dan -n50 <dat>/n" "./rel -n50 <dat>/n"
    225.5 +- 1.2 μs (AlreadySubtracted)Overhead
    4177 +- 15 μs   ./dan -n50 <dat>/n
    4302 +- 17 μs   ./rel -n50 <dat>/n
    /t$ a (4302 +- 17)/(4177 +- 15)
    1.0299 +- 0.0055
    /t$ a 299./55
    5.43636... # kurtosis=>5.4 sigmas is not so significant

Of course, as per my first sentence, the best benchmarks are your own applications run against your own data and its idiosyncratic distributions.

EDIT: btw, /t -> /tmp which is a /dev/shm bind mount while /n -> /dev/null.