I think the interviewer interpreted Massalin’s comment correctly. She was (is?) involved in the design of the MicroUnity ISA. You can find her name on quite a

I think the interviewer interpreted Massalin’s comment correctly. She was (is?) involved in the design of the MicroUnity ISA. You can find her name on quite a few of their patents. She also posted to comp.compilers[0] about an improved version of the superoptimizer. Their product was targeted at media codecs and signal processing so it would be natural to use a superoptimizer to identify whether an instruction was worth including in the ISA. AFAIK MicroUnity never shipped a product but filed a lot of early patents on SIMD. They sued a number of tech companies for patent infringement so they may still exist. [0] https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/97-07-088 https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/97-07-088