Comment by jonhohle

7 hours ago

There was a recent post that probably explains the details better than I could[0].

This would most like just be the concern of the compiler and assembler. In GCCs case, my understanding is it just inlines the assembly into the output assembly stream and the assembler is none the wiser. The issue is that MetroWerks doesn’t support inline assembly at the top level (for defining new function symbols), but only inline within the context of a function. That means some additional setup and tear down that shouldn’t be present may be injected instead of the raw assembly.

There’s possibly some upseet potential and the idea that it could be done in place could avoid loading the entire thing k to memory (though the files are small for modern systems).