[hbrn]

Feels like we're going in circles. I guess that's what you get for nitpicking :)

JIT can indeed do a lot of tricks to reduce JIT overhead. But you can't present that as a benefit of JIT over AOT: AOT doesn't have JIT overhead at all.

JIT can definitely trade space for time. I bet that JIT will inline/memoize certain calls based on call frequency.

The only thing I'm arguing against is that low call frequency (like zero branch executions) somehow provides room for optimization compared to AOT. The only optimizations you can do in this case are optimizations for JIT overhead itself.

Anything beyond that is simply not possible: you can't eliminate a branch and detect the fact that you were supposed to enter eliminated branch at the same time: the simplest mechanism that allows you to do that is branching!