I argue about this a lot. Some reasonably substantiated opinions: 1. Highly sophisticated large-scale static analysis keeps getting beaten by relatively stupid

I argue about this a lot. Some reasonably substantiated opinions: 1. Highly sophisticated large-scale static analysis keeps getting beaten by relatively stupid tricks built into overgrown instruction decoders, working on relatively narrow windows of instructions. 2. The primary reason for (1) is that performance is now almost completely dominated by memory behavior, and making good static predictions about the dynamic behavior of fancy memory systems in the face of multitasking, DRAM refresh cycles, multiple independent devices competing for the memory bus, layers of caches, timing variations, etc. is essentially impossible. 3. You can give up on a bunch of your dynamic tricks and build much simpler more predictable systems that can be statically optimized effectively. You could probably find an good local maxima in that style. The dynamic tricks are, however, unreasonably effective for performance, and have the advantage that they let you have good performance with the same binaries on multiple different implementations of an ISA. That's not insurmountable (eg. the AOT compilation for ART objects on Android), but the ecosystem isn't fully set up to support that kind of thing.