Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 1,304 posts.

Software Engineering
1277

X86 Register Encoding

If you've ever look at the disassembly output for C or C++ code, you'll probably notice that there are a lot of push/pop instructions. And if you pay close enough attention, you'll notice that the compiler prefers to use certain registers over others. In particular, compilers will prefer pushing "old" registers like…