Strange instructions in compiler output (was: A simple question)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday,  5 March 2004 at 13:43:04 -0500, Chungwei Hsiung wrote:
> Hello..
> I am super new to this list, and I have a simple question that I don't
> know why it does that. I have a simple test program. I compile it, and
> gdb to disassemble main. I got the following..
>
> 0x80481f8 <main>:       push   %ebp
> 0x80481f9 <main+1>:     mov    %esp,%ebp
> 0x80481fb <main+3>:     sub    $0x8,%esp
> 0x80481fe <main+6>:     and    $0xfffffff0,%esp
> 0x8048201 <main+9>:     mov    $0x0,%eax
> 0x8048206 <main+14>:    sub    %eax,%esp
> 0x8048208 <main+16>:    movl   $0x804a6ce,0xfffffff8(%ebp)
> 0x804820f <main+23>:    movl   $0x0,0xfffffffc(%ebp)
> 0x8048216 <main+30>:    sub    $0x4,%esp
> 0x8048219 <main+33>:    push   $0x0
> 0x804821b <main+35>:    lea    0xfffffff8(%ebp),%eax
> 0x804821e <main+38>:    push   %eax
> 0x804821f <main+39>:    pushl  0xfffffff8(%ebp)
> 0x8048222 <main+42>:    call   0x804823c <execve>
> 0x8048227 <main+47>:    add    $0x10,%esp
> 0x804822a <main+50>:    mov    $0x0,%eax
> 0x804822f <main+55>:    leave
> 0x8048230 <main+56>:    ret
>
> I don't know if at line 5, we move zero to %eax. why do we need to sub
> %eax, %esp? why do we need to substract 0 from the stack pointer??
> Any help is really appreciated.

This is probably because you didn't optimize the output.  You'd be
surprised how many redundant instructions the compiler puts in under
these circumstances.  Try optimizing and see what the code looks like.

If this *was* done with optimization, let's see the source code.

Greg
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