Okay, I did know about "Just In Time" compiling; I thought "jit" was something I didn't know about. Thanks for that.
About the pathfinding example: Apart from reducing traces as much as possible by giving each node a linked list containing every node it can see (and only recalculating these lists when obstacles change), I have optimised my pathfinding by writing my own ray-trace.
Now, to expect to imitate an engine function and then out-perform it is ridiculous. However: my particular situation allows me to reduce the trace to something performed in 2D space with far simpler obstacles, I can have all sorts of different groups of obstacles so that the trace only considers obstacles that are only relevant for entities of certain sizes, and since all I'm concerned about is the PASS/FAIL of the trace (rather than the normal, the distance to the point of contact, the position of the point of contact, among other things that c_trace automatically does for you) each trace can terminate as soon as an obstacle is found instead of searching for the earliest contact.
I like how all that comes out really fast and I don't have to look at making a DLL or anything to make it worth using over c_trace.
Although, I don't think many users will go that far, and so like you said: it won't be an issue for most.
