True, but it's relevant today (since around 1996 with the mmx instruction set). And if some people are arguing today that you can have single pass, fast and sim

True, but it's relevant today (since around 1996 with the mmx instruction set). And if some people are arguing today that you can have single pass, fast and simple, and get ~max performance on modern architecture. I'm not saying you can't, I'm just saying that "as fast machine code as early 90s era c compilers" might not translate to as fast as today's c++ compilers machine code.