[throwaway_pdp09]

I don't buy this. I understand the use of your term 'threaded', but these are unconditional and therefore can be incorporated into the instruction pipeline with little or no overhead. Here's a very old SO post, CPus won't have got worse since then

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5127833/meaningful-cost-...

"But in general, on modern processors, there is minimal cost for an unconditional jump. It's basically pretty much free apart from a very small amount of instruction cache overhead. It will probably get executed in parallel with neighbouring instructions so might not even cost you a clock cycle. "

[rwmj]

If they were all unconditional, that would be fine. The problem is they are all computed jumps (see jonesforth for details).

[throwaway_pdp09]

I see what you're getting at now, thanks