Thanks that clears some of it up. It seems that java runtimes that do EA actually do this sort of crazy difficult analysis that quickly breaks down with branches and non-inlined code.
X thing = new ...;
if (slowpath) {
unlikely_function(thing);
}
...
This in turn lets the inliner be smarter about what it does and doesn't inline, vs c2 which tries to greedily inline everything, partly to assist escape analysis