“What next?”
Again my pet ignored language/compiler technology issue goes unmentioned: data layout optimizations.<p>Control flow and computation optimizations have enabled use of higher level abstractions with little or no performance penalty, but at the same time it's almost unheard of to automatically perform  (or even facilitate) the data structure transformations that are daily bread and butter for programmers doing performance work. Things like AoS->SoA conversion, compressed object references, shrinking fields based on range analysis, flattening/dernormalizing data that is used together, converting cold struct members to indirect lookups, compiling different versions of the code for different call sites based on input data, etc.<p>It's baffling considering that everyone agrees memory access and cache footprint are the current primary perf bottlenecks, to the point that experts recommend considering on-die computation is free and counting only memory accesses in first-order performance approximations.