[suresk]

Yeah, I think any bytecode interpreter ends up with a giant switch in the critical path at some point :)

Around the time that change was made to Go, Andrew and I were looking at this and wondering how big of a performance hit it was and if there were a better way to structure that. I had a hunch that the compiler should be smart enough to not compile that as a switch/giant if block, and a quick trip to a disassembler showed it using binary search. This commit: https://github.com/golang/go/commit/1ba96d8c0909eca59e28c048... added the jump table and has some nice analysis on where it makes sense to do binary search vs jump tables.

As far as I can tell, with certain restrictions (that are fine in this case), it is pretty reliable at optimizing giant if/else blocks and switches.