Yes, this should totally be attempted. All the stack manipulation opcodes could be dropped if we just made (nearly) everything use 3-address codes, e.g. ADD would take the names of three registers, left, right and result. The compiler would keep track of which registers contain a live object (for reference counting) but that can't be much more complicated than checking for stack under- and over-flow.
Also, nothing new indeed -- my first computer (a control data cyber mainframe) had 3-address code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600#Central_Processor_(CP)
On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 1:01 PM Neil Schemenauer nas-python@python.ca wrote:
On 2019-02-26, Victor Stinner wrote:
I made an attempt once and it was faster: https://faster-cpython.readthedocs.io/registervm.html
Interesting. I don't think I have seen that before. Were you aware of "Rattlesnake" before you started on that? It seems your approach is similar. Probably not because I don't think it is easy to find. I uploaded a tarfile I had on my PC to my web site:
http://python.ca/nas/python/rattlesnake20010813/It seems his name doesn't appear in the readme or source but I think Rattlesnake was Skip Montanaro's project. I suppose my idea of unifying the local variables and the registers could have came from Rattlesnake. Very little new in the world. ;-P
Cheers,
Neil _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/guido%40python.org