No, no changes before or after or anywhere else. Just that one line. I have written my share of hand-optimized assembly, but this is just an optimizer peculiar

No, no changes before or after or anywhere else. Just that one line. I have written my share of hand-optimized assembly, but this is just an optimizer peculiarity. I am not after trying to understand why it happened, and I was making a joke calling it a "technique". That said, here's an assembly dump of both versions, just in case :) - Slower version - https://gist.github.com/4454234 https://gist.github.com/4454234 Faster version - https://gist.github.com/4454238 https://gist.github.com/4454238