Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by naasking 3482 days ago
> TL;DR - a stack machine is conceptually simpler than a register machine, and it doesn't matter if it's slower since you are JIT'ing it anyway

It totally matters. See [1] for previous work on this topic. You need to perform expensive data flow optimisations to generate information the stack format doesn't need to encode, but that a register format does need. Better to do this analysis ahead of time in the compiler than at runtime.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/events/vee05/full_papers/p153-yunhe.p...