[scythe]

In tune with the parent's point about decompilation, the transformation from assembly to machine code is more or less completely reversible and often local, allowing the assembly to be tested in chunks that are less detectable. Linking is also "reversible", though attacks on the linker are actually much more common in practice than attacks on the compiler (LD_PRELOAD injection etc). So the verification he was concerned with becomes much easier when using assembly for bootstrapping.