Alp just noticed this commit to Mono:
2006-04-19 Massimiliano Mantione
* mini.c: Disabled inline where it can alter the call stack in a
way visible from managed code.
* driver.c: enabled inline,consprop,copyprop,treeprop,deadce by
default.
And was wondering why we did not make more noise about it.
The story is that the actual new optimizations shipped in
1.1.14, but inlining had some negative side effects that broke
some applications (for instance, if we inlined a method that
used System.Reflection.Assembly.GetCallingAssembly() you would
get the wrong assembly.
The other problem that we found was related to the order in
which classes were initialized when no static constructor was
defined (for the full gory details, you can read this).
The first issue has been fixed (the inliner was too happy
inlining). We have solved the known instances of static
constructor initialization, but inlining might expose some of
these problems, hopefully they should be resolved by the time
we ship 1.1.16.