On: Write Your Own Virtual Machine

[TimJYoung]

Object Pascal (Delphi) also optimizes case statements, depending upon the nature of the statement:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/2548425

I tested this recently (Delphi XE6), and it definitely is as-described: you get straight jump instructions with enough case statement branches, and it is very fast.

Barry Kelly worked on the Delphi compiler, and I believe he comments here on Hacker News occasionally.

[vardump → TimJYoung]

> you get straight jump instructions with enough case statement branches, and it is very fast

That's what pretty much any half-decent compiler does nowadays. It'd be much more surprising if it didn't.

[TimJYoung → vardump]

The interesting part to me was the variations in the emitted instructions, based upon the source. IOW, it would be easy to mistakenly think that you weren't going to get jumps if you only used a few case branches to test things out.