[azinman2]

> But what are you going to do? Hand-code an optimisation for every similar thing people could write?

While I appreciate that you solved the general problem, I wonder if there are legs here. Specifically, could one mine GitHub to find automatically common patterns that one could write specific optimizers for, or at minimum, leverage that to learn what semi-general cases are worth optimizing? To my knowledge optimizing compilers already do have effectively handlers for common operations, but I don’t know if anyone has leveraged “big data” to help guide this.

IIRC, various tweaks and optimizations in Java were guided by Sun analyzing their own code based. GitHub is just so much bigger, and polyglot.