Comment by blt

Tangent: I wish more (any?) high-level languages were capable of expressing self-modifying code safely. A lot of values are variable at compile time but constant within a significant block of computation at runtime. If compilers were designed to emit self-modifying code, they could propagate constants through the block and replace register/register instructions with register/immediate instructions, freeing up registers for other variables. This is the promise of JIT compilers but in practice the popular jit-compiled languages have too many other performance issues to be popular for serious CPU-bound work. Plus the jitter has to do a lot of analysis at runtime. It would be cool if you could mark a block of C code with `#pragma jit`, making the compiler emit a binary that contains some compiler IR and a peephole optimizer to make the code as tight as possible given the conditions at runtime.