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A comment on Actually Portable Executable. Parent comment

Re:Actually Portable Executable by pcwalton on Friday February 26, 2021 @12:27PM (#26277293)
Not true. This is a common myth that comes from some old Linus posts in the 32-bit Pentium 4 days and still won't die. I've done comparisons to test this. Compare sizes of modern x86-64 Linux binaries to their counterparts on AArch64. You'll find that they're extremely close.

The biggest problem is all the REX prefixes. The inefficient encoding of registers in x86-64 squandered all the advantages that x86 had.

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Re:Actually Portable Executable by a1369209993 on Friday February 26, 2021 @02:15PM (#26278616)
Is true. They said:

> > x86 generally has an advantage [empahsis added, not "x86-64"]

Obviously if you take the worst of both worlds (bloated and variable-width instructions), you can squander that advantage, but the advantage is in fact real.

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