Small Potatoes (Score 1, Insightful)

You are seriously worried about a C compiler optimizing a NULL compare? How mind-numbingly unproductive. You should see some of my code. I program in a real high-level language (SML). I use a real high-level compiler (MLton). I count on the compiler to do things like flatten my data structures, turn unknown function calls into switches and do closure conversion of my inner functions. The computer industry needs to stop living in the 1950s. If we had 1/10 the man hours put into compilers for high-level langauges like SML/Haskell/OCaml as has been put into C compilers, we would be able to produce 2x as fast code without _ever_ worrying about abstracting.