Modern processors are pretty crazy beasts. He right in saying it&#x27;s impossible to say for sure without some hard numbers or profiling.<p>Comparatively, while one is three instructions and the other is one, that single instruction is still doing everything the other three are doing. The only reason they aren&#x27;t both one instruction seems to be that `addw` must not being a thing (Why, I don&#x27;t know). Since the I&#x2F;O done by both will be nearly identical, and the addition&#x27;s should be very comparable in speed, it&#x27;s not crazy to say they should perform basically the same. If you compiled with -O2 I bet you&#x27;d see almost identical code, since it would probably remove the memory access.