[virtmach] register vs. stack machines

[Durchholz, Joachim]

> see:
> http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/rob/hotchips.html

The Dis papers tend to strongly state the advantages of the choices that
were made for Dis, instead of presenting the full engineering trade-offs.
Which makes them great for evangelisation, but not so great for preparing
your own decisions.

For example, the cited paper doesn't discuss the disadvantages of
reference-counting garbage collection (increased memory traffic to keep the
reference counts up-to-date, object reclamation as a possible and unexpected
side effect of pointer assignments which makes it difficult to guarantee
real-time deadlines).

I don't know how far this sloppiness/marketing speak attitude transfers to
their discussion of stack vs. register architecture. I'd rate the Dis
literature as an interesting data point, but not as an authority.

Just my 2c.
Joachim