Comment by badmonster
Comment by badmonster 18 hours ago
LEA is a beautiful example of instruction reuse. Designed for pointer arithmetic, repurposed for efficient addition. It's a reminder that good ISA design leaves room for creative optimization - and that compilers can find patterns human assembly programmers might miss.
Human assembly programmers on the 8086 used LEA all the fucking time. And I'm not sure good ISA design is characterized by the need for ingenious hacks to get the best mileage out of the hardware; rather the opposite, in my view. The ARM2's ISA design is head and shoulders better than the 8086's.