I disagree with -fPIE making things slow, specially in the ~13 general purpose registers of ARM. Maybe -fPIE affect things in the register-starved x86, not so much in modern archs. Also, "fucked up beyond all repair" is a little exagerated when the repair is to add "-fPIE" to some binaries.

As a mild counterpoint, I semi-recently tried to start habitually compiling my executables with -fPIE on my AMD64 development machines, and at least several months ago, the GDB I got from Debian sid was not up to the task of debugging such a creature and would fail to attach to the process and emit mysterious error messages. AMD64 being a mature architecture where I would expect PIE to have a significant benefit, it wouldn't surprise me if this were true for ARM also, or if other toolchain elements had similar problems. So that could provide a disincentive to switch over to position-independent executables.

Yeah, I'm guessing ARM will be ok with respect to GPRs (although I certainly haven't done any benchmarks).

Dug's FUBAR comment was just an attempt cram in as many acronyms as possible...of course the situation is improvable. ;-)

Still at CORE these days?

No more CORE for me Doc :) playing the "entrepeneur" now, without the social app or i-phone app, so, no glamour I'm afraid.