I was actually asked in an interview at Google in 2011 whether pre- or postincrement was faster in a snippet of code where the expression's value wasn't used.

I was actually asked in an interview at Google in 2011 whether pre- or postincrement was faster in a snippet of code where the expression's value wasn't used. When I said that I was pretty confident that the compiler would produce the same assembly in both cases, the interviewer insisted that pre- was faster based on the same logic you mentioned. To her credit, she didn't penalize me for disagreeing with her and I still got the offer.