> love to move around registers Using -O2? I would imagine register moving is done in this case out of necessity due to either call conventions, syscall conven

> love to move around registers Using -O2? I would imagine register moving is done in this case out of necessity due to either call conventions, syscall conventions, loop semantics, etc > Pad everything/stick nops everywhere Yes and I'm glad they do. Branching to a non 16-byte aligned address is much slower. Accessing misaligned data is slower too.