Nothing I was suggesting would create "awful" performance. Inlining and unrolling are not necessary to get reasonable performance -- just try gcc or Clang with

Nothing I was suggesting would create "awful" performance. Inlining and unrolling are not necessary to get reasonable performance -- just try gcc or Clang with -Os. For an occasional exception to "act like a DoS attack", the cold path would have to be thousands or millions of times slower than the hot paths. But compiler optimizations don't create anywhere near these kinds of constant factors. Even from -O0 to -O3 is more like a 5-10x difference, maybe 100x in extreme cases. The difference between -Os and -O3 is much more modest, more like 0-50%. Nothing that is going to cause anything remotely resembling a DoS.