While I guess it's true that not all that many people understand the restrict annotations in the various compilers, I don't think it's an unreasonable expectati

While I guess it's true that not all that many people understand the restrict annotations in the various compilers, I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation from people writing saxpy-like computational kernels. It's certainly a prerequisite to doing research work on optimizations like this. STOKE isn't really doing dynamic alias analysis per se, although if run for long enough its results should theoretically be equivalent to such analysis. As the example assembly shows, however, it's far from a sure thing. More generally, things like PGO exist because they specifically do things traditional compiler-level optimizers fundamentally can't. For STOKE to make a similar claim we should see much better code examples than the one shown here.