Gcc surprised me once. I had put some effort into replacing something like (x << 12) | (x>>20) with the appropriate roll instruction at the assembly level. On

Gcc surprised me once. I had put some effort into replacing something like (x << 12) | (x>>20) with the appropriate roll instruction at the assembly level. Only after seeing that the "optimized" code ran no faster than plain GCC, I looked at the GCC output and of course the roll was there. I believe it was GCC 3.*, so even older than the one mentioned in the article.