I wonder what programmers at the time would think of CPUs eventually being so good at handling loops that unrolling changes from an optimisation technique to be performed manually, to one that compilers might sometimes do, to an anti-optimisation:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.agner.org&#x2F;optimize&#x2F;blog&#x2F;read.php?i=142" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.agner.org&#x2F;optimize&#x2F;blog&#x2F;read.php?i=142</a><p><i>It is so important to economize the use of the micro-op 
cache that I would give the advice never to unroll loops.</i><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lkml.iu.edu&#x2F;hypermail&#x2F;linux&#x2F;kernel&#x2F;0008.2&#x2F;0171.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lkml.iu.edu&#x2F;hypermail&#x2F;linux&#x2F;kernel&#x2F;0008.2&#x2F;0171.html</a><p><i>by eliminating all instances of Duff&#x27;s Device from the XFree86 4.0 server, the server shrunk in size by _half_ _a_ _megabyte_ (!!!), and was faster to boot</i>