The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation
A software engineering anecdote describes how a team of developers encountered extremely inefficient code generated by a compiler. The team ultimately modified their x86 emulator to automatically optimize the poorly written code during runtime.
Why it matters
It highlights the historical challenges of binary translation and the lengths engineers go to for performance optimization in legacy systems.
During an exchange of war stories, a colleague of mine told one from back in the days when Windows included a processor emulator for x86-32 on systems that natively ran some other processor. (This has happened many times. And no, I don t know which processor this particular story applied to.)
The article is a technical anecdote with no political or social bias.
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