Actually OS kernels and Linux kernel in particular have many not obvious requirements. Consider easy disassembly for example. > The code generation part ends u

Actually OS kernels and Linux kernel in particular have many not obvious requirements. Consider easy disassembly for example. > The code generation part ends up being nice when something goes wrong. When somebody sends in an oops, I often end up having to look at the disassembly (and no, a fancy debugger wouldn't help - I'm talking about the disassembly of the "code" portion of the oops itself, and matching it up with the source tree - the oops doesn't come with the whole binary), and then having code generation match the source makes things a _lot_ easier. https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/error_jumps.html https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/error_jumps.html