[Python-Dev] Why is Bytecode the way it is? (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Fri Jul 9 03:17:02 CEST 2004

Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com>:

When I looked at this a long time ago it I seem to recall that roughly 60% of the opcodes executed did nothing more than copy values to or from the stack (of course, pushes and pops are some of the more efficient opcodes in the instruction set). A three-address machine model would reduce this data movement substantially.

But it would only be worth doing if the cost of these data movements is a substantial fraction of the whole execution time. Does anyone have any timings to suggest that they are?

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+

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