Force compiler to not optimize side-effect-less statements

So I want to make sure when I profile, I'm not getting skewed results. As such, I'd like to make sure the compiler does not optimize out statements

You are by definition skewing the results.

Here's how to fix the problem of trying to profile "dummy" code that you wrote just to test: For profiling, save your results to a global/static array and print one member of the array to the output at the end of the program. The compiler will not be able to optimize out any of the computations that placed values in the array, but you'll still get any other optimizations it can put in to make the code fast.

Assignment to a volatile variable shold never be optimized away, so this might give you the result you want:

static volatile int i = 0;

void float_to_int(float f)
{
    i = static_cast<int>(f); // has no side-effects
}