Looking forward to GCC 7

When I last looked, the policy was that, by default, the compiler should generate code that runs correctly on the widest variety of released hardware (i.e. the smallest common instruction set), but is tuned for the latest, fastest chips. This makes sense, in that users who are most interested in performance have the newest hardware, and anybody who wants better performance actually gets it by buying the new hardware and running the program as built with the newest compiler. I don't think that policy changed.

So, inserting instructions between the test and the branch pessimizes current hardware, by default, in exchange for possibly less-bad performance on very old, slow hardware that (manifestly) nobody cares about enough to upgrade. It seems more likely to me that nobody on the project has reviewed the particular choice to insert the instructions, in light of current developments. In fact, when I last checked (in 6.1, I think), telling gcc to tune for Haswell did not make it emit fusible test-and-branch sequences.

But I would be interested to learn about a change in the policy, if any, and what motivated it.