aggressive

Etymology

From aggress + -ive. Compare with French agressif.

adj

1. Characterized by aggression; unjustly attacking; prone to behave in a way that involves attacking or arguing.
   an aggressive policy, war, person, nation
   When a new aggressive fish is added to an aquarium with an already-established, territorial fish, the established fish will probably fight to protect its territory (the whole tank). 2011, Judith S. Weis, Do Fish Sleep, Rutgers University Press, page 63
2. (programming) Of heuristics, source code optimization techniques, etc.: exploiting every opportunity to be applied.
   This paper describes how aggressive loop unrolling is done in a retargetable optimizing compiler. 1996, Tibor Gyimothy, Compiler Construction: 6th International Conference, CC '96, Linköping, Sweden, April 24 - 26, 1996. Proceedings, Volume 6, Springer, page 59
   Since the most aggressive type of optimization a program can be subjected to is parallelization, understanding a program before attempting to parallelize it is a very important step. 2001, Paul Feautrier, edited by Santosh Pande and Dharma P. Agrawal, Compiler Optimizations for Scalable Parallel Systems, Springer, page 173
   However, aggressive compiler techniques such as loop unrolling, promoting of subscripted array variables into registers (especially in of subscripted array variables into registers (especially in loops) and interprocedural optimizations create heavy register pressure and it is still quite important to do a good job of register allocation. 2002, Y. N. Srikant, Priti Shankar, The Compiler Design Handbook: Optimizations and Machine Code Generation, CRC Press, page 465
   The Itanium processor is an example of an Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture and thus relies on aggressive and expensive compiler optimizations for performance. 2002, Shpeisman, T. ; Lueh, G.-Y. ; Adl-Tabatabai, A.-R., PACT 2002: 2002 International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques : proceedings : 22-25 September, 2002, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, IEEE Computer Society Press →ISBN, page 249
   This sensibly eases the programmer task and allows for more aggressive optimisations of the global program structure. 2003, Susanna Pelagatti, edited by Fethi Rabhi and Sergei Gorlatch, Patterns and Skeletons for Parallel and Distributed Computing, Springer, page 182
   The CUDA C code for the GPU, as well as the C and inline assembly code for the CPU, were highly optimized and aggressive compiler optimizations (-O4) were turned on. 2011, Wen-mei W. Hwu, GPU Computing Gems Jade Edition, Elsevier, page 11
3. (pathology, of a tumour or disease) That spreads quickly or extensively; virulent; malignant.
4. (finance) Involving high risk for potentially high reward.
   an aggressive stock; an aggressive portfolio
5. (US, LGBT, Black lesbian slang) Female but having a male or masculine gender presentation: butch.
   For quotations using this term, see Citations:aggressive.

noun

1. One who is aggressive.
2. (US, LGBT, Black lesbian slang) A (Black) woman who presents as masculine; a butch.
   …; usually the femme is the ho [at the costume party], and the butch/aggressive is the pimp. … An aggressive is a masculine-identified woman like the category of butch; aggressive is the contemporary term among younger masculine-identified women. 2012-02-01, Siobhan Brooks, Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry, State University of New York Press, page 110