A code size microbenchmark for C

Motivation ? No compilers could always generate smaller code than others ? Hand-optimized code is often hard to understand ? Programmers tend to write readable code and trust compilers generate fast and compact code for them ? There is a plenty of room for improving compiler optimizations Our goal: help compiler developers improve their products by giving them actionable test cases that pinpoint missed optimizations Reality to Compilers ? Compilers need trade off between the degree of optimizations and the amount of time spent in optimizing code ? Compilers suffer phase-ordering problems where the quality of generated code depends on the order of executed optimizations ? Compilers have to balance the machine-dependent and machine-independent features