Tangential, but I almost never read assembly [1], but I do read Java bytecode pretty frequently, primarily because doing that can sometimes be a good substitute

Tangential, but I almost never read assembly [1], but I do read Java bytecode pretty frequently, primarily because doing that can sometimes be a good substitute for benchmarking [2], which I do not enjoy. The thing that never seems to stop tripping me up is the different “dup” codes that compile. At some point I really need to properly learn the difference between dup_x2 and dup2_x1 and dup2_x2. [1] not out of like an ethical objection, just my career has involved almost no reverse engineering and it’s also never been a path I have been super interested in to pursue on my own. [2] e.g. if two competing chunks of code emit the same bytecode, you don’t need to pull out JMH. My go to example for this is using if statements vs switches, which will usually emit the same code so performance arguments are moot.