> At this point, optimizing compilers are excellent and probably have more architecture details baked into them than I will ever know.

While modern compilers are great, you’d be surprised about the seemingly obvious optimizations compilers can’t do because of language semantics or the code transformations would be infeasible to detect.

I type versions of functions into godbolt all the time and it’s very interesting to see what code is/isn’t equivalent after O3 passes