>how compilers and compiler engineers are sabotaging the efforts of cryptographers

I'm not exposed to this space very often, so maybe you or someone else could give me some context. "Sabotage" is a deliberate effort to ruin/hinder something. Are compiler engineers deliberately hindering the efforts of cryptographers? If yes... is there a reason why? Some long-running feud or something?

Or, through the course of their efforts to make compilers faster/etc, are cryptographers just getting the "short end of the stick" so to speak? Perhaps forgotten about because the number of cryptographers is dwarfed by the number of non-cryptographers? (Or any other explanation that I'm unaware of?)

It's more a viewpoint thing. Any construct cryptographers find that runs in constant time is something that could be optimized to run faster for non-cryptographic code. Constant-time constructs essentially are optimizer bug reports. There is always the danger that by popularizing a technique you are drawing the attention of a compiler contributor who wants to speed up a benchmark of that same construct in non-cryptographic code. So maybe it's not intended as sabotage, but it can sure feel that way when everything you do is explicitly targeted to be changed after you do it.

It’s not intentional. The motivations of CPU designers, compiler writers, and optimizers are at odds with those of cryptographers. The former want to use every trick possible to squeeze out additional performance in the most common cases, while the latter absolutely require indistinguishable performance across all possibilities.

CPUs love to do branch prediction to have computation already performed in the case where it guesses the branch correctly, but cryptographic code needs equal performance no matter the input.

When a programmer asks for some register or memory location to be zeroed, they generally just want to be able to use a zero in some later operation and so it doesn’t really matter that a previous value was really overwritten. When a cryptographer does, they generally are trying to make it impossible to read the previous value. And they want to be able to have some guarantee that it wasn’t implicitly copied somewhere else in the interim.

“Sabotage” can be used in a figurative sense that doesn’t insinuate intent. An adjacent example is “self-sabotage”, which doesn’t imply intent.