[fwsgonzo]

I have been working on this too, and while I am not at all interested in embedding LLVM, the lack of calling conventions and lack of ability t make a direct jump is unfortunate.

My biggest pet peeve though is the inability to push unlikely stuff completely to the back of the program. I mean just put it away where nobody can see it. I also want to align code blocks to 1 bytes. Not 16 bytes. Not a single compiler lets me realign the instruction handlers in a way that compresses them down.

I also want to know what BOLT does that improves my interpreter by around 30%.

[sillycross]

Clang/LLVM accepts (little-known but documented) flags to let you align code block using a custom alignment, though it only works at file-level. See [1].

However, I'm not sure if doing so is useful or necessary. Interpreter performance is sensitive to code layout (which affects hardware branch predictor accuracy), but I don't think there is a general way to optimize the code layout to make the branch predictor as happy as possible.

So if you changed your code alignment and saw a perf change, it's more likely caused by the random perf gain/loss due to code layout change, not because that 1-byte-alignment is better than 16-byte-alignment or vice versa.

[1] https://easyperf.net/blog/2018/01/25/Code_alignment_options_...