Take a look at the OCaml bytecode interpreter: case bodies are all very small there, so the instruction dispatch time really counts. I got this 2x times differe

Take a look at the OCaml bytecode interpreter: case bodies are all very small there, so the instruction dispatch time really counts. I got this 2x times difference when comparing this bytecode interpreter built with and without computed goto, but I don't remember any other details at the moment. In my own bytecode interpreters the difference was up to 4x, again, because each bytecode instruction implementation was tiny and trivial (like, move something from one register to another, or perform an arithmetic operation). > Even the inner loop of an interpreter usually calls routines These are too high level interpreters for the too dynamic languages, they're beyond any hope in terms of performance, by design. I'm talking about some simpler and better designed things (like OCaml, for example).