In many situations yes, and C/C++ compilers miss a lot of opportunities for constant folding/propagation. But still, an infinitely smart compiler can’t prove an

In many situations yes, and C/C++ compilers miss a lot of opportunities for constant folding/propagation. But still, an infinitely smart compiler can’t prove anything about a value that comes from a file, user input or socket at runtime. If control flow depends on those (which is true of every useful real-life program) then you’re out of luck. GMP arbitrary-size integers are amazingly fast but still much slower than native instructions, can’t be vectorized, require heap allocation, etc.