Dude, TFA is talking about the code-generator of a cross-compiler targetting a 40 years old, 8bit, 2MHz CPU, that can address a whopping max of 64KB of memory.

Dude, TFA is talking about the code-generator of a cross-compiler targetting a 40 years old, 8bit, 2MHz CPU, that can address a whopping max of 64KB of memory. There's really not a whole lot of code to generate, and your compiler host machine is a beast compared to the target machine. Focusing on making code generation faster makes almost zero sense in this case.