To be clear I understand you correctly, you think there was a chance that Intel would add a CPU instruction that is "more performant" than ADD? In fact, signifi

To be clear I understand you correctly, you think there was a chance that Intel would add a CPU instruction that is "more performant" than ADD? In fact, significantly so, to the extent that this would justify the overhead of a dynamically linked function call? Do I understand you correctly? (BTW, this is exactly the kind of argument people made in defense of left-pad, which in my view completely validates my analogy.)