[izabera]

this looks convenient to use from c++, but the example code it generates is rather suboptimal (see https://godbolt.org/z/3rWceeYoW in which no normal compiler would set up and tear down a stack frame for that) so i'm guessing there isn't any support for optimisations? what's the advantage of this over just compiling + calling dlopen/LoadLibrary on the result?

[whizzter]

For simple functions an C compiler will generate code that is perhaps 50% faster than this standard prologue/epilogue (modern CPU's eat up most of the "bloat" whereas the branch to _any_ function will cause some branch predictor pressure), as soon as the function grows the gains will be smaller as long as the code runs somewhat in a straight line and isn't subject to cache misses.

Compared to even an optimized interpreter this will be somewhere between 4x to 20x faster (mainly due to having far far smaller branch predictor costs), so even if it doesn't generate optimal code it will still be within an magnitude of optimal native code whereas an interpreter will be much further behind.

dlopen/LoadLibrary,etc comes with far more memory pressure and OS bookkeeping.

[rurban]

I guess for the first function call not, but subsequent calls yes. They claim that register optimizations are properly done.