Data placement in memory

I am playing with buffer overflow attacks in C. I have the following code:

int foo(void*, void*);        // Calculates the distance (in bytes) between two addresses in memory

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
   int a = 15;
   int b = 16;
   int c = 90;

   char buffer[4];
   
   /* Memory layout */
   printf("[LAYOUT]\n");
   printf("foo(&a, &b) is %d\n", foo(&a, &b));
   printf("foo(&a, &c) is %d\n", foo(&a, &c));
   printf("foo(&c, &string) is %d\n", foo(&c, &string));
   printf("foo(&a, &string) is %d\n\n", foo(&a, &string));

   /* Memory content before copying into the buffer */
   printf("[BEFORE]\n");
   printf("a is at %p and is %d (0x%08x)\n", &a, a, a);
   printf("b is at %p and is %d (0x%08x)\n", &b, b, b);
   printf("c is at %p and is %d (0x%08x)\n", &c, c, c);
   printf("string is at %p and is %s\n\n", &string, string);

   strcpy(buffer, "aaaaaaaaa");

   /* Memory content after copying into the buffer */
   printf("[AFTER]\n");
   printf("a is at %p and is %d (0x%08x)\n", &a, a, a);
   printf("b is at %p and is %d (0x%08x)\n", &b, b, b);
   printf("c is at %p and is %d (0x%08x)\n", &c, c, c);
   printf("string is at %p and is %s\n", &string, string);

   return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

int foo(void* addr_1, void* addr_2) {
   return (addr_1 - addr_2);
}

After the compilation with gcc main.c -o main -O0 -g -fno-stack-protector -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=0 flags with optimization turned off, the output is following (on my machine):

[LAYOUT]
foo(&a, &b) is 4
foo(&a, &c) is 8
foo(&c, &string) is 4
foo(&a, &string) is 12

[BEFORE]
a is at 0x7ffee13d5b68 and is 16 (0x00000010)
b is at 0x7ffee13d5b64 and is 15 (0x0000000f)
c is at 0x7ffee13d5b60 and is 90 (0x0000005a)
string is at 0x7ffee13d5b5c and is 

[AFTER]
a is at 0x7ffee13d5b68 and is 16 (0x00000010)
b is at 0x7ffee13d5b64 and is 97 (0x00000061)
c is at 0x7ffee13d5b60 and is 1633771873 (0x61616161)
string is at 0x7ffee13d5b5c and is aaaaaaaaa

Obviously, the buffer is located at the leftmost position, before integer variables. I can think of it as:

It completely overwrites c's data (all four bytes) and the one byte of b's data (little-endian machine).

After compiling the same program with the optimization turned on, -O1 for example, it produces the output:

[LAYOUT]
foo(&a, &b) is -4
foo(&a, &c) is -8
foo(&c, &string) is 12
foo(&a, &string) is 4

[BEFORE]
a is at 0x7ffee056db3c and is 16 (0x00000010)
b is at 0x7ffee056db40 and is 15 (0x0000000f)
c is at 0x7ffee056db44 and is 90 (0x0000005a)
string is at 0x7ffee056db38 and is 

[AFTER]
a is at 0x7ffee056db3c and is 1633771873 (0x61616161)
b is at 0x7ffee056db40 and is 97 (0x00000061)
c is at 0x7ffee056db44 and is 90 (0x0000005a)
string is at 0x7ffee056db38 and is aaaaaaaaa

It seems to me that integer variables are placed in memory in reversed order.

The questions are:

1. How does a variable declaration and/or initialization in C affect its placement in memory?
2. Does the optimization affect on variable placement in memory? If so, then how?

The working environment is macOS Mojave 10.14.6, Apple LLVM version 10.0.1 (clang-1001.0.46.4)