Java instead of freedom - the best option?

[Tom Thornhill]

Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> 
> In article <01bc5949$fabf0a80$725e9082@mniw1001>,
> 
> Actually, the stack nature of the JVM makes very little difference to a
> JIT.  Unlike Forth or PostScript, you can always tell how deep the
> stack is at any point with a static analysis, and you can therefore map
> stack slots onto registers pretty easily.  If you're willing to spend a
> little time on register allocation, the stack architecture has no impact
> on generated code at all (ignoring the complexities of exceptions and
> jsr/ret).
> 
>         J

But if your going to use register allocation why not let the compiler do
it -
surely there are things that you know at compile time but not in a JIT.
Also
the original Risc studies show that memory access falls off with more
registers
as follows

 memory accesses  = Peak ( 1 -exp ( K*number of registers ) )

Peak is for a accumulator machine, and the function levels off for
number of registers >= 30

So if we know that performance increase above 32 regs is negligable, why
not hardcode
this into the VM. On machines with fewer regs we'd have to use the regs
we have as
a cache for off chip memory ( which would be in the on chip data cache
), and there
are unlikely to be mainstream processors with more ( why do I suddenly
see an 
incoming contradiction ;-).

Tom.


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