Anatomy of Emitted Code
Function prologues and epilogues, frame pointers, and how to map C statements onto instruction sequences.
Every function has a shape
A typical prologue pushes callee-saved registers it will use, adjusts the stack pointer for locals, and sometimes keeps a frame pointer. The epilogue reverses it. Recognizing this shape is 80% of reading any dump: everything between the prologue and epilogue is your function's logic.
Mapping C to instructions
int tri(int n) { return n * (n + 1) / 2; }
The emitted code may never touch a multiply in the way you wrote it — compilers turn n * (n + 1) / 2 into shifts and adds when profitable. The lesson is not 'assembly is hard'; it is the compiler is already optimizing, and reading its output shows you the transformations modules 4 and 10 only described.
How to look, honestly
gcc -S (assembly text), gcc -c + objdump -d (disassembly of the object). Output differs across architectures (aarch64 vs x86-64) and across optimization levels. Professional practice: read your own function's dump, compare -O0 against -O2, and explain each difference. Never memorize one platform's mnemonics as 'the truth'.