[virtmach] register vs. stack machines

[virtmach@iecc.com]

i was pointing to the paper because it had been mentioned;
i'm not sure that the GC issues are germane to
the point under discussion.
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From: "Durchholz, Joachim" <Joachim.Durchholz@halstenbach.de>
To: "'virtmach@iecc.com'" <virtmach@iecc.com>
Subject: Re: [virtmach] register vs. stack machines
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 15:41:46 +0200
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> 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.