I don't agree. There's already way too much compiler magic happening, and the process to nudge/hint the compiler towards doing the right thing is already too op

I don't agree. There's already way too much compiler magic happening, and the process to nudge/hint the compiler towards doing the right thing is already too opaque and fragile. Optimizations need to be predictable, transparent and robust, also across compiler vendors and compiler versions. What we need instead is "always on" profiling/debugging/inspection tools so that I can see directly and immediately the performance impact of my code changes while I'm typing the code (down to the compiler output as disassembly, annotated with performance warnings like predicted cache misses). Basically the same sort of evolution which gave us warning and error squiggles while typing, but for performance (think godbolt.org, but in realtime and with hot code reloading).