July 30, 2001
8:08 a.m.
Tim Peters <tim@digicool.com>:
The per-opcode fetch-decode-dispatch overhead is very high in SW too, so a register VM can win simply by cutting the number of opcodes needed to accomplish a given bit of useful work.
That's an interesting idea. OK, so possibly I was wrong -- I hadn't considered that stack-push/stack-pop operations might introduce overhead comparable to the order-of-magnitude speed difference between registers and main memory in hardware. I'm still skeptical, but my mind is open. -- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a> You know why there's a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one. -- Rush Limbaugh, in a moment of unaccustomed profundity 17 Aug 1993