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Re:Will It Optimize? See how well you can anticipate gcc's o... by gsg on Sunday April 07, 2013 @11:40AM (#5507535)
x86 has encodings for shifts by 1 that are two bytes, so there's no code size advantage.
Re:Will It Optimize? See how well you can anticipate gcc's o... by mpyne on Sunday April 07, 2013 @12:02PM (#5507599)
Sometimes there are "canonical forms" for these operations depending on what chip is being targeted, where the hardware can automatically break data dependencies and improve hardware-level parallelism, as long as the instruction is encoded in the right form.

I don't know that this is necessarily the reason here, but it's one possible explanation.