On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 2:44 AM, Venkatraman S
On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 1:18 AM, Antoine Pitrou
wrote: Antonio Cuni made some experiments on PyPy about this, If you ask at the pypy-dev mailing list or on irc (#pypy on freenode.net) he or others can explain what happened.
Looks like there was no attempt on that front.
The biggest complication I can think of with a register-based VM is that you have to decref objects as soon as they aren't used anymore, which means you have to track the actual lifetime of registers (while it's done automatically with a stack-based design).
I hope to take this as 'fun' project and try it out. Not sure how far i will reach.
I think this would be interesting to attempt. Lua switched to a stack-based VM to a register-based VM for Lua 5.0. http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/sblp2005.pdf includes some benchmark numbers. Collin Winter