Am I the only one...

who thinks GCC sucks? Not the compiling engine, but the interface to it. It's made of confusing, illogical, error prone options with stupid default values, and the idea of calling everyone and their mother itself (and mix everyone's options together) is as bad as penis cancer. For example, -s is passed directly to the linker, yet -rpath isn't; -Wall and most of -Wstuff controls warnings, yet -Wl is some kind of hack to pass comma-separated arguments to the linker, especially the ones not supported by gcc; etc. Whoever did this has a disturbed mind. And I think I know who did this.

Anyways, is there a sane interface which provides completely separate, non-automagical preprocessor+compiler, assembler, and linker, with well thought out options?

Still a poor metric, because while newer processors are RISC internally, they're still running CISC instruction. In other words, the x86 instructions are translated into CPU microops, and the translation isn'tone-to-one. A translated x86 instruction may take several microops.

Furthermore, there are all the problems surrounding branch misses, cache lines, etc. So no, a simple analysis of the code like you mention won't work except for the most trivial example.

BTW, I really doubt a program like >>26 mentions exists. Think about it.