This reminds me of a comment in a particularly hairy section of code in the MWC 8086 compiler written by dgc (among other things, author of MicroEmacs). I don't have the exact wording but it was something to the effect of
I am frankly embarrassed by the number of bugs that have been tracked to this function.
This was in the day before register coloring.
Earlier, I had the chance to write a code generator for an implementation language targeting the 8085 (!) and even that was sufficiently hairy that the team that took it over complained about the difficulty of improving the code.
I am frankly embarrassed by the number of bugs that have been tracked to this function.
This was in the day before register coloring.
Earlier, I had the chance to write a code generator for an implementation language targeting the 8085 (!) and even that was sufficiently hairy that the team that took it over complained about the difficulty of improving the code.
[Edit] Time sequence correction.