Thank you

Written by me, proof-read by an LLM. Details at end.

It's the 25th! Whatever you celebrate this time of year, I wish you the very best and hope you are having a lovely day. For me, this is a family time: I'm not at all religious but was brought up to celebrate Christmas. So, today we'll be cooking a massive roast dinner and enjoying family time.¹

This series was an idea I had around this time last year, and it has been a substantial amount of work. I've really enjoyed writing it, and seeing the impact it has had on the compiled language community. I realise now in retrospect I exclusively used C and C++, and concentrated on x86 a bit too much. If I do this again, I'll try and widen my horizons!²

Speaking of doing it again, I have a number of half-researched, half-written ideas that didn't make the cut. I may either write a few more non-advent posts exploring them, or keep them for another year. Right now I can't promise anything: most of the work for this series was done while I was between jobs, and now I am I don't know if I'll be able to do this again. Despite the low-budget look of the videos, and the shortness of the posts, it has been a pretty phenomenal amount of work. I don't know how regular content creators do it! I may post a follow-up on "the making of AoCO", and go into some details of how I approached this series.working full time

I'd like to thank a number of people:

And of course, thank for joining me on this journey. Compilers are amazing: truly one of the quiet modern miracles that makes the modern world possible!you

See that accompanies this post.the video

This post is day 25 of , a 25-day series exploring how compilers transform our code.Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025

← When compilers surprise you

This post was written by a human () and reviewed and proof-read by LLMs and humans.Matt Godbolt

.Support Compiler Explorer on or , or by buying CE products in the PatreonGitHubCompiler Explorer Shop

• for some ideas, feedback and for being such a proponent of Compiler Explorer over the years.Jason Turner
• for his review and encouragement.Malcolm Rowe
• for her help and detailed instructions on getting a decent video setup and editing workflow.Laurie Kirk
• for invaluable video editing tutoring.Sean Riley
• whose "Advent of Beeb" videos were the inspiration for this series.Colin Hoad
• All the folks who work on compilers: GCC, clang, MSVC and the many others. I really only dug into GCC and clang, but without the hard work of compiler maintainers, this series wouldn't exist.
• All of Compiler Explorer's Patrons (), GitHub sponsors (), and in particular Greg Barker for his ideas.join them herejoin them here
• The - a group of lovely people who very kindly give up their time to help administrate the site, triage and fix bugs, and add new features. Without them, Compiler Explorer wouldn't be a tenth of the site it is now.Compiler Explorer Team
• And of course, my wonderful wife, Ness, for her support over the last few months as I routinely ignored her to write articles and record and edit videos. Thank you - I love you so very much.