Ironically, the vast majority of "improvements" listed in the post (everything except using scasd) are algorithmic ones that are in fact doable in a compiled la

Ironically, the vast majority of "improvements" listed in the post (everything except using scasd) are algorithmic ones that are in fact doable in a compiled language. And even special machine instructions seem quite achievable with a pattern-matching code generator. Overall I think the HN title is very misleading - the article seems more "compilers don't do this well yet", definitely not "compilers can never do this".