Replying in reverse order to your questions: With the debug_on checked moved outside the loops there will be no performance difference. The point of the loop i

Replying in reverse order to your questions: With the debug_on checked moved outside the loops there will be no performance difference. The point of the loop is to emulate paths that are called many times and can't be optimised by the compiler, for example, having the debug check inside a different function that does something else. I'm not sure if it's the check itself or bad branch prediction that caused it, it doesn't matter for my case, as it's still a cost. It also happens when I use GNU extensions (__builtin_expect) to mark the test as unlikely to be true.