Agreed. As a high performance library function such tricks are par for the course, but you'd hope it wouldn't be sprinkled through ordinary code without good re

Agreed. As a high performance library function such tricks are par for the course, but you'd hope it wouldn't be sprinkled through ordinary code without good reason. The best of both worlds would be having the compiler transform the canonical std:: version into the fast one under the covers, but that's far from universal with current compiler tech and languages.