For reference Dan's blog entry at: http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000321.html
I think that the situation has changed again and that we should consider the original register in the stack scheme.
1) In the presence of MMD and delegate functions, object acessor methods and OO in general, we'll probably do a lot more function calls, then the assumptions stated in the article.
2) Hardware CPU speeds increase much faster then RAM access timings. The relative cost of one extra pointer indirection is decreasing steadily.
3) JIT can execute as fast as now, when we reserve one register as the stack frame pointer. JITs speed isn't so much gained by the absolute address access, but by avoiding any memory access. That is: on the begin of a basic block fill CPU registers (mov mem, %reg), then execute as much as possible just in registers and at the end of a basic block store hardware regs back to Parrot's. The "mov mem, %reg" or "mov %reg, mem" operations are the expensive part of it (2 cycles instead of 1 mostly).
So a register fetch could look like "mov x(%ebp), %reg", where x is the offset in the register array and %ebp the register frame pointer. [1]
This instruction has the same execution speed as the absolute memorx access.
4) The absolute addressing scheme in prederefed and JIT run cores implies a separate "compilation" (predereferencing or JITting) of the code per thread. This has additionally some memory costs and possible negative cache effects when different threads execute different code.
[1] yes I'm thinking of just one frame pointer :) Well, the whole scheme makes a stack machine out of Parrot:
I0,...In, In+1....Ik, Ik+1...Il ^ | frame pointer
I0..In are the incoming function arguments
In+1..Ik are the working registers of the function
Ik+1...Il are outgoing args for a function call
Calling a function is just a move of the frame pointer to "Ik".
The working register file size is adjusted to the actual needs of the function.
Actually registers would be arranged (I0,S0,P0,N0,I1,S1...)
Is this scheme just crazy? leo
