They're not off the table, but you do have a point in that they are harder to attain reliably (hence the popularity of Fortran in certain circles). That being s

They're not off the table, but you do have a point in that they are harder to attain reliably (hence the popularity of Fortran in certain circles). That being said, I don't believe there's any optimization that Fortran (or any other general purpose AOT-compiled language) can do that, for instance, C99 couldn't. That's why restrict exists. There are two caveats to that statement. The first is JIT compilation, for obvious reasons. The second is that some domain specific languages with very restrictive semantics could do memory layout optimizations that are off the table by definition in any general purpose language (transform AoS patterns to SoA, etc.).