Not trying to mock here, but did you program assembly in the 80s/90s and/or look at compilers involved with CPU's of comparable complexity to the 68000 series o

Not trying to mock here, but did you program assembly in the 80s/90s and/or look at compilers involved with CPU's of comparable complexity to the 68000 series or older? Yes, relative addressing on older machines like that does hurt a ton (I was coding a jam-game of the GameBoy recently and had to re-orient some of my code away from stack-usage since I've gotten a tad "lazy" over the years and didn't care to program 100% assembly). On modern machines (since circa Pentium generation CPU's) that can do one cycle-multiplications memory-offset accesses are often irrelevant for the performance of access operations. More importantly, at about 500mhz-1ghz the sheer latency of main-memory accesses vs cached accesses will start to become your main worry since cache-misses start to approach _hundreds of cycles_ (this is why we have the entire data-oriented-design philosophy growing), while on the other hand the modern CPU's can pipeline many instructions to even make the impact of bounds checks more or less insignificant compared cache misses.