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by BeeOnRope 121 days ago
More registers leads to less spilling not more, unless the compiler is making some really bad choices.

Any easy way to see that is that the system with more registers can always use the same register allocation as the one with fewer, ignoring the extra registers, if that's profitable (i.e. it's not forced into using extra caller-saved registers if it doesn't want to).

1 comments

Yes, the argument for increasing the number of GPRs is precisely to eliminate the register spilling that in necessary in x86-64 programs whenever a program has already used all available architectural registers, a register spilling that does not happen whenever the same program is compiled for Aarch64 or IBM POWER.