I think we are on the same page here. The compilers have become very good, especially the expensive ones like the Intel C compiler - I've seen some very impressive benchmarks.

Some of this is hard to believe. At IBM one group was benchmarking an experimental FORTRAN compiler version and the benchmark was some humongous FFT thing. The results of the new compiler was almost instantaneous and everybody went oh, darn there must be some serious error here, because it just can't be that fast! As it turned out, the compiler figured out that this huge computation could never result in an output and it replaced the whole program with a single return statement! When things get that smart, it is even hard to benchmark them!