Our backends have done roughly the same good/bad job of generating
code since, well, forever. Until that changes, you will see that the
only performance improvements you get in the general case are things
that the backend was too dumb to get in the first place (IE loads,
stores)
I don't think that's fair. There are many things that can be done at
higher level that could never be done in a backend, such as the very fancy
tail recursion we do and some loop optimizations. One can construct quite
amazing test cases for them. What's disappointing to me is that it seems
they don't trigger nearly as much in real code as one would like to see.
