[rsc]

Yes, I believe LLVM has a flag for "run only the first N optimization passes" that gets used with binary search this way.

A global optimization fuel that worked at finer granularity would be even more precise but you'd have to have the compiler run single-threaded to make sure the numbering always matches. At least in the Go compiler, we compile different functions in different threads, so that fouls up any global numbering.