Rethinking optimization for size

This is actually a quality of implementation issue. There are compilers out there that give fantastic listings, even down to a mostly-readable highish-level decompliation even after very aggressive code transformations. This is not very easy to obtain and really has to be baked-in at the beginning of the compiler design.

But you're right in that a good compiler will make your code unrecognizable. :)

> I wish the listing got more respect. It can be a powerful optimization
> tool.

Indeed. I don't think there's much one can do with gcc to get a decent listing. It just doesn't carry enough information. Neither does LLVM, unfortunately, at least AFAIK.