Originally written Q1 2007 as part of my Static Reverse Engineering Training Class, first published March 8th, 2010 on OpenRCE.

I've decided to release the part of my training material relating to compiler optimizations. I created this back in January of 2007; for a while I was teaching classes very often, and so it made sense to keep it private. Nowadays I only teach a few classes a year, and so this presentation is sort of languishing away on my hard drive, which is a shame since it's my favorite part. I think people will enjoy reading it, so I have decided to make it public.

Since I made this in early 2007, it lacks some of GCC 4's optimizations, and from time to time I realize that I forgot an optimization or two. But for the most part, it's fairly complete. If you have any specific suggestions for optimizations that I missed, please either email me or respond via comment with a link to a binary exhibiting said optimization and the address at which I can find it. Proper compiler-theoretic names for the optimizations, if applicable, are also appreciated.

Here it is. Enjoy.