[JoeAltmaier]

Depends entirely upon the compiler. Don't worry about this stuff in general unless you're doing embedded work, where the compilers are often problematical. Any desktop compiler will know more about generating code than you do.

[sliverstorm]

Embedded compilers are perfectly intelligent; I would hazard that you just wind up doing weird things more often, and/or you care more what exactly it does with this or that function because of your 32kHz clock and/or 1KB of program memory.

[tryp]

Many embedded compilers and assemblers are terribly buggy. Having worked with dozens, my impression is that the compilers targeting 8-bit microcontrollers are generally of similar quality to 80's x86 compilers. Emission of incorrect assembly given correct code is rare, but optimizations are incredibly weak and the compilers segfault relatively often.

Some of the DSP tool suites have solid compilers that optimize insightfully for their target architecture but whose in-circuit debuggers are tied to flaky IDEs. I'm currently working with an XDP debugger on a Sandy Bridge board that requires the debugger software to be restarted nearly hourly, often corrupting the project file requiring me to enter the memory map again.

Lately I've been thrilled to spec in ARM micros because I can just use GCC, an el-cheapo universal USB JTAG adapter through OpenOCD, and expect everything to work.