The IBT NOP is "free" in that it will evaporate in the pipeline; it still has to be fetched and decoded to some extent, but it does not consume execution resour

The IBT NOP is "free" in that it will evaporate in the pipeline; it still has to be fetched and decoded to some extent, but it does not consume execution resources. From a tooling perspective, what you're describing (two entrypoints for a function, the jump you mention is pointless) would require changes up and down the toolchain; it would affect the compiler, all linkers, all debuggers, etc. By contrast, just adding an additional instruction to the function prolog is relatively low-impact. It's also worth noting that at the time code for a function is emitted, the compiler is not aware of whether the symbol will be exported and thus discoverable in some other module, or by symbol table lookup, so emitting the target instruction is essentially mandatory.