> Isn't there any study about average executable size when comparing CISC vs RISC? The RISC-V people have done a few while developing their RVC (compressed ins

> Isn't there any study about average executable size when comparing CISC vs RISC? The RISC-V people have done a few while developing their RVC (compressed instructions) extension; see for instance slide 16 of https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/riscv-compressed-workshop-june2015.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/riscv-compresse... which shows, on 64-bit, x86-64 (CISC) being slightly bigger than ARMv8 (RISC), and on 32-bit, x86 (CISC) being much bigger than ARM Thumb2 (RISC). The main reason is that the encoding of x86 instructions is not very efficient, with rare instructions having shorter encodings than common instructions; an infamous example being the "ASCII adjust" single-byte instructions which nobody uses.