> You're not really "giving up" portability I should have been more clear; that comment was in reference to some of the techniques the paper discusses which do

> You're not really "giving up" portability I should have been more clear; that comment was in reference to some of the techniques the paper discusses which do give up portability, namely "inline-threaded dispatch" and "context-threaded dispatch." My overall points are: switch() isn't that bad, and most practical dispatch techniques ultimately boil down to either a single indirect branch or replicated indirect branches. > Regarding the effect of CSE & tail-merging: I have only seen GCC to do this once I've never seen it happen with my own eyes, but it appears the Python guys experienced this also at one point and had to tweak the flags -fno-crossjumping and -fno-gcse. http://bugs.python.org/issue4753 http://bugs.python.org/issue4753 > I will try to verify this on the weekend. Do you have a blog? I'd love to hear what you discover.