[scialex]

This sort of pattern can't be found by incremental lowering (and isn't common enough to have more sophisticated analysis written for it) so it ends up in a local maximum.

Basically the idea for most compilers is to do a series of transforms which incrementally improve the program (or at least make it worse in understood and reversible ways). To do this transform you need the optimizer to do the (not always trivial) proof that the 2*x is equivalent to x+y, do the replacement, do the gvn to duplicate the adds and finally do the branch elimination. Each of these steps is however totally separate from one another and the first one doesn't trigger since as far as it's concerned a shift left is faster than an add so why should it do the replacement.

This is all even more complicated since what representation is faster can depend on the target.

[AlotOfReading]

I agree, but GCC manages the optimization, and not all optimizations need to take fewer cycles. The single instruction version is obviously better for -Os and it would probably be a win in general.