It’s not just about code size or cycle count anymore; modern OoO (Out-of-Order) processors treat this idiomatically. The renamer recognizes xor reg, reg as a dependency-breaking zeroing idiom immediately, which frees up the physical register allocation faster than a mov. It's fascinating how hardware optimization has effectively leaked into the instruction set definition over time.
Interesting approach. I've spent a lot of time wrangling PDF internals recently, and the issue is usually maintaining the xref table integrity when you inject new content streams.
Does this approach rewrite the entire file structure on save, or are you appending incremental updates to the EOF? Incremental is safer for corruption, but file size bloats quickly with AI-generated diffs.
Most failed projects I've been around were killed by accidental complexity—too many abstraction layers wrapping simple logic.