[perfmode]

Thanks for the information.

> We built a prototype of the emulator in C, but it quickly became obvious that we could not achieve the level of performance desired in C. Examination of code emitted by the C compiler showed it took very poor advantage of the Alpha's dual-issue capabilities. A second implementation was done in Alpha assembly language and is the basis for the current product.

First pass in C. Final, in Assembly.

Chip at the time was a first-generation DEC Alpha AXP 500 which had a 512 KB B-cache and two 8 KB caches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha

Let's say its present day and you want to fit into a 256K L2. What language toolchains are available? How far can one go with JIT?

[ploxiln]

I think Lua, statically compiled against musl libc, can fit in 200KiB. Not in a (32KiB) L1 cache as the grand-parent comment asked, but in L2. There's also LuaJIT, which I think is only a bit bigger, I'm not sure ...