Right, I suppose my second paragraph was waffling on the extra legwork the compiler would have to do, but I know validating optimizations is just the start of t

Right, I suppose my second paragraph was waffling on the extra legwork the compiler would have to do, but I know validating optimizations is just the start of the work. Maybe this could be a good way to jump into messing with LLVM... Out of curiosity, how much of a performance difference did you observe in practice when you made this optimization?