[tom_mellior]

> Every single C compiler worth mentioning will turn a switch statement into a jump table.

Yes, but that is not the optimization discussed here. The optimization discussed here is looking ahead to the next bytecode instruction's opcode, using it as a key into a different jump table, and jumping to that target. No C compiler I'm aware of does that.

C compilers could try to match on common patterns in interpreter implementation (a switch within a loop, keyed on certain bits of a piece of data read mostly linearly from an array) and heroically generating a dispatch table, but that would still fail in the cases of branches where you don't want to call DISPATCH because execution does not necessarily proceed to the next instruction in the array.