alt Hacker NewsTo be fair, this isn't that different from things we'd do back in the day.
I use to write BBS software in BASIC on the C64, and one of the things we'd do is use a "compiler" that would do some optimizations. What this allowed was being able to write a program too big to actually run, but the optimized version of it could.
I wish I could share more details and be less hand-wavy... but it turns out the 80's were a long time ago and I just haven't given it much thought since then (at least until I saw your comment).
Computer magazines of the era also did that with C64 listings because they were such a pain to type as is. They usually distributed a tool to type your program in first, and then published much more legible and plain text (non-PETSCII) code listings instead.