I am only little surprised that it works; after all, compiling a program for two platforms results in a mostly equivalent control flow graphs, except for optimi

I am only little surprised that it works; after all, compiling a program for two platforms results in a mostly equivalent control flow graphs, except for optimizations and different code gen strategies (*); and of course platform specific stuff (but that was probably already abstracted for such a project back then). BUT I was very (pleasantly) surprised someone did go through the effort of implementing this and made it available for everyone as FOSS <3 (*, rant) I think inlining and tail call optimizations (especially calls into libc or the equivalent of the era) might cause the most trouble. Also loop generation can have subtle differences reflected in the CFG (not only loop unrolling, but also transforming a while-loop into a do-while-loop causes differences in the CFGs). Back then I'd also expect compilers not always perform equally well for "simple" things like dead code elimination. I wish I had the time to check out bindiff in detail, it's really interesting (personal bias: In the past I did work on static code analysis and had a supporting role in a compiler dev team).