I agree it's hackish, hence the comment explaining what it is for. It illustrates a need for a "neverinline" language feature. But currently there is no such feature, not even a proposal for one, so we have to work with what we have.

@Dicebot I understand your position, but in this case the fake loop doesn't actually hurt anything - worst case, it is just ignored by any compiler. Often when tuning for the fastest code, one winds up with some odd looking code. So we have to decide - do we want the fastest code, or do we want to stand on principle?