In most cases it should make it faster. Any type of optimization is kind of a tricky thing because you can't predict what the user is going to do in the field.

In most cases it should make it faster. Any type of optimization is kind of a tricky thing because you can't predict what the user is going to do in the field. Take sorting algorithms, for example. Quicksort can degenerate to O(n^2) if you lay your elements to be sorted out in a specific order which will always have bad pivots. I'm not sure if you are familiar with C and x86 assembly, but the test harness code was linked to in the article. It is a contrived example specifically designed to beat gcc's optimization.