The only issue I have with this are that you are using a compiler from 1998 (visual c++ 6) at that time I think the Pentium !!! was just starting to get popular. There are college students now who were toddlers when this compiler came out. I would love to see a treatment of a more recent compiler generating instructions for more recent x86 CPUs.
I completely agree. It also seems the list of programs that were analysed is not quite as diverse as one might wish. It'd be great to see what some other categories of software might use. For instance, I could see OpenOffice to be an interesting application to look at.
Yeah. For instance, in IA64 calling conventions the first several function arguments are passed in registers (taking advantage of the greater number of registers than in IA32) so the number of PUSH instructions should be reduced quite a bit.
