It was only a couple of years ago since I wrote an assembly language program of my own and got hit by branching-limits on the Z80 processor.
I did exactly the same things that were suggested in this article, either inverted conditionals, or had a thunk - essentially "jmp nextJump", where that jumped to the actual location.
I sometimes spent a few hours shuffling code around to remove the longer jumps and re-order code in groups closer together to save individual bytes.
This is really useful! I only knew about -mcmodel during compilation but I didn’t know the linker would insert thunks for faraway branches. I would’ve thought that the linker would simply complain and ask you to recompile with a larger code model. Also interesting that different linkers (or the same linker on different architectures!) chose different thunk creation algorithms.
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