[charsii]

It's trivially easy.

One low hanging fruit: Compilers are handicapped by ABIs and language semantics, they must adhere to calling conventions, alignments, paddings, exceptions/stack unwinding, etc.

If you don't have to care about any of that you can save a lot of useless instructions.

And secondly when it comes to size optimizations, compilers are pretty bad (or they tend to still value some speed over pure size). Wont find any modern compiler emitting lodsb/stosb (the non-rep kind) on x86 for example.

[kaba0]

> Compilers are handicapped by ABIs and language semantics, they must adhere to calling conventions, alignments, paddings, exceptions/stack unwinding, etc.

I believe most of these are only at potential “extern C” points. Usually these conventions are upheld because they don’t have a huge cost, but to give you a trivial example: inlining is literally about dropping all that in favor of optimizing at a larger scope.