[metadat]

This jives with my understanding of pipelining architecture and speculative execution, thank you for connecting the dots! Seriously cool to understand why that line works better.

It seems unfortunate the compiler isn't able to realize "no further assignments are ever performed on node->next, it is side-effect dependency free, optimize the spec exec accordingly". Though, how often would this be the case in a real-world program of actual utility.. probably rare.

[trealira]

No problem; I'm glad to be helpful.