Even more interesting :). From my days as a junior member of a team developing a compiler and run-time libraries, I really like the approach we took there: if

Even more interesting :). From my days as a junior member of a team developing a compiler and run-time libraries, I really like the approach we took there: if the compiler generated sub-optimal code for a straightforward implementation, we'd aim to fix the compiler instead of tweaking the code. That's more difficult if you're not already maintaining your own compiler, of course. And algorithmic improvements are still valuable. In this case, the optimiser already generated efficient code. Makes me wonder if any observed speed-up might have been because the incorrect code needed to do less work?