[Python-Dev] Rattlesnake progress (original) (raw)

Neil Schemenauer nas@python.ca
Tue, 19 Feb 2002 10:20:53 -0800

Daniel Berlin wrote:

The largest problem on architectures like x86 is the number of registers. You end up with about 4 usable registers. (hardware register renaming only helps eliminate instruction dependencies, before someone mentions it). Performance quickly drops when you start spilling registers to the stack.

I'm not going to be using hardware registers. Bytecode will be generated to run on a virtual machine. I can use a many registers as I want. However, I suspect it would be better to reuse registers rather than have one for every intermediate result.

Neil