[neonsunset]

There are two aspects to this:

- If payload is not inlined, the loop can't be optimized away. The fact of iteration itself may be a desirable side-effect (spin-wait/pause) a stricter compiler can't make an assumption about, unlike GCC or Clang

- If payload is inlined, it should be a no-op. If it's not, and its result consumed by an opaque "sink" method, there may be limitations.

On interproc analysis - don't forget you can dynamically load code and access payload through reflection too. This limits certain optimizations that are otherwise legal in AOT compilation. .NET has similar restrictions and corresponding differences when publishing binaries with JIT vs AOT - the former gets to enjoy DynamicPGO (HotSpot kind of optimizations), the latter gets to enjoy frozen world (with exact devirtualization, faster reflection, auto-sealing, etc. but overall not as good as DynamicPGO with guarded devirt, branch reordering, etc.).