HN user
Yeah, I realize it was an open-ended question. I'm just curious if one was starting a (C-like) compiler from scratch, where the biggest bang for the buck comes from. It seems like peephole optimizations are already handled at runtime by the CPU itself.
Only loosely related, but I'm curious: What compiler optimizations have the biggest impact on scientific / floating point computation? Integer (audio/image) ops? With modern CPUs performing speculative execution, register renaming, and all the other magic they do, the CPU is acting like an optimizer in its own right. x64 is mostly just a byte code that gets JIT compiled at runtime. I'd be interested in seeing how much specific optimizations (including classic ones) contribute to speeding things up.