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>For example, error paths are generally very cold, but how is a compiler supposed to know that a path is an error path? They just look like regular conditionals.

At least for .NET that path is likely throwing an exception. If you don't have a profile, statically assuming those paths are cold is likely to be correct.

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That's an interesting point -- my background is more in C and C++-without-exceptions. But in exception-based languages, I can see how the presence of "throw" would be a very useful signal for static analysis.

Yes, this is a side benefit to exceptions (or some other language's way to highlight errors and thus likely cold paths).

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