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This sort of thing drives me crazy sometimes. Why can't we have a high level assembly language which can represent the code that's executing. Right now I have the choice of either looking at the code, which can be wrong, or looking at assembly, which is hard to associate with the code. Why can't I look at annotated assembly which tells me exactly which part of the code it corresponds to?

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> Why can't I look at annotated assembly which tells me exactly which part of the code it corresponds to?

Because modern optimizations make that impossible. (How do you represent a statement that GVN eliminated, for example?) Not doing those optimizations would make code unacceptably slow.

Use Visual Studio with optimisation off. Its disassembly view will then line up fairly well with the C++ source.

(and with "structured exception handling" and a bit of hacking, you can get backtraces for machine exceptions as well)

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