🚀 go-pugleaf

   Date: 24 Mar 90 15:55:10 GMT
   From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva)

   So why are you against register windows, which allow you to put
   more of this important resource on a chip without slowing it down
   by making the register address incredibly wide?

They make downward funargs[*] extremely expensive.  Back to
addressible registers or stack caches.

The problem with a stack cache is of course the cache-management
hardware itself, and is the usual argument people give against it.

Can someone point me to any real comparison numbers on the performance
of such machines vs reg. window machines?  The point in defense of reg
windows is usually that they are cheap to make (in chip landscape) and
that the space used by the directory would better be spent on more
registers themselves.  However I've never seen real data on their
performance.

Probably even with a stack data cache you'd still want a few global
registers.

g


[*] lexical functions which share the parent's lexical environment and
    can be passed down the call chain.