[saurik]

While I personally find the if statements harder to immediately mentally parse/grok--as I have to prove to myself that they are all using the same variable and are all chained correctly in a way that is visually obvious for the switch statement--I don't find "but what if we use a naive compiler" at all a useful argument to make as, well, we aren't using a naive compiler, and, if we were, there are a ton of other things we are going to be sad about the performance of leading us down a path of re-implementing a number of other optimizations. The goal of the compiler is to shift computational complexity from runtime to compile time, and figuring out whether the switch table or the comparisons are the right approach seems like a legitimate use case (which maybe we have to sometimes disable, but probably only very rarely).

[smaudet]

Per my sibling comment, I think the argument is not about speed, but simplicity.

Awkward switch syntax aside, the switch is simpler to reason about. Fundamentally we should strive to keep our code simple to understand and verify, not worry about compiler optimizations (on the first pass).

[saurik]

Right, and there I would say we even agree, per my first sentence; however, I wanted to reply not to you, but to doctor_phil, who was explicitly disagreeing about speed.