[nanolith]

Few languages provide such guarantees. But, there really was no way with this particular compiler to pass a hint to generate constant time code.

Black box designs work until the knob or dial you need to control it isn't there. I would have taken a pragma, a command-line option to the compiler, or even a language extension.

This is one example of many as to why I think that user-guided code generation should be an option of a modern tool suite. If I build formal specifications indicating the sort of behavior I expect, I should be able to link these specifications to the output. Ultimately, this will come down to engineering, and possibly, overriding or modifying the optimizer itself. An extensible design that makes it possible to do this would significantly improve my work. Barring that, I have to write assembler by hand to work around bad assumptions made by the optimizer.