Interesting tidbits from article: A modern Intel processor has up to 180 instructions in flight at a time (in stark contrast to a sequential C abstract machine

Interesting tidbits from article: A modern Intel processor has up to 180 instructions in flight at a time (in stark contrast to a sequential C abstract machine, which expects each operation to complete before the next one begins). A typical heuristic for C code is that there is a branch, on average, every seven instructions. If you wish to keep such a pipeline full from a single thread, then you must guess the targets of the next 25 branches. The Clang compiler, including the relevant parts of LLVM, is around 2 million lines of code. Even just counting the analysis and transform passes required to make C run quickly adds up to almost 200,000 lines (excluding comments and blank lines).