[mappu]

I use push/ret idiom all the time to stdcall off the stack.. did not realise there was a return cache, that's very interesting.

[Taniwha]

depends on the CPU - but it's relatively trivial thing to build (especially because unlike other caches it's a stack) on x86s return nominally is ALWAYS a bad pipe bubble: a pop followed by an indirect jump - the pop gets resolved at the end of its micro-op and the jump wants to be resolved early on so as to start decoding the next instruction

In the end it can't hurt to generate a bad jump prediction off of the return cache, it's no worse than being idle - the effect of messing with the cache though can cause it to always fail so as a result you get no advantage from it

[Taniwha]

(I should add - it's an x86, you're really register poor - sometimes you do have to do stuff like that - but if you have a register "mov reg, a;jmp (reg)" is better than "push a;ret")