I decided to try #3 for myself. The results are interestingly inconsistent. If you cast a to int and print it, it comes out -96. But the shell reports it as 160. Godbolt compiler clearly shows it returning -96 (movsx should sign extend it) so I don't know what's happening. https://godbolt.org/z/9rxcnM3G3
Replying to myself. I did some digging and figured it out - the shell itself truncates the return value to an 8 bit unsigned number. If you have a simple program that consists of only "return -96;" the shell will still report a return value of 160.
