As far as I know, adding the support for restrict didn’t trigger any bugs in GCC
That's very impressive for gcc. IIRC adding restrict to LLVM triiggered major bugs and miscompilations at least for the first two attempts. As they said they need to do a crater run to be sure, but even passing the initial smoke test is an achievement for gcc.
However, I'm surprised the code is “only” 3% faster using restric annotation. IIRC the speed-ups were about 5% for LLVM so maybe there is still some performance to gain on the gcc side?