[Python-ideas] Register based interpreter

[Leonardo Santagada]

On Feb 20, 2009, at 3:15 PM, Chris Rebert wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Venkatraman S <venkat83 at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Has there been any discussion or effort on moving from a stack based
>> interpreter to a more register based one?
>> (my limited search in the archives did not yield me any results)
>
> It's possible PyPy will investigate that, and the Python
> implementation on Parrot (which was stagnant last I checked) would
> obviously be register-based, but as for CPython, I don't think it's
> going to happen (at least not any time soon). The bytecode is
> stack-oriented through-and-through; it'd be quite a major change to
> become register-based.


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. If I remember correctly there  
weren't any significant improvements in performance as dispatch and  
memory copies is not the problem on python, the bytecodes are very  
complex.

[]'s
--
Leonardo Santagada
santagada at gmail.com