Yes it's mostly for entertainment. I didn't want to stress anyone out with this. Round 2 was specifically to 1) Show people not to take this seriously 2) To ser

Yes it's mostly for entertainment. I didn't want to stress anyone out with this. Round 2 was specifically to 1) Show people not to take this seriously 2) To serve as an example that some modifications doesn't mean earlier examples do/don't inline. So they wouldn't overthink. Outside of the first two rounds most of these were inspired by real code but simplified for reading. I think it'd be less entertaining if it was more serious and more had realistic code. A lot more people would tune out. If it was any longer I think it would have made more sense to explain why something was optimized or not. I don't work on clang or gcc so I may not be a good person to write that kind of article > someone with "good intuition" for inlining wouldn't necessarily know (or need to care) what happens at every call site Round 5 (the virtual function/dynamic cast round) was inspired by a person who claimed to have 20 years of experience. He suggested a way I could implement a feature in my compiler. I eventually wrote a test case to see if compilers would 'devirtualize' function calls as he claimed. They didn't. From memory he works on making servers preform so he wasn't a stranger to performance. I think "good intuition" is more about knowing what won't inline and having some tactics you can use in the first 5 minutes after looking at a flamegraph