[JoachimSchipper]

This is not so much "outsmarting the compiler" as "working with the compiler" - tweaking code to trigger certain optimizations/generate particular output. The missing part, of course, is showing that these optimizations actually help...

[dpzmick]

In this case I don't think that being clever can actually help us much. I have some microbenchmarks towards the end of the post that are not very indicative of any performance gained by writing this "clever" code.