Re: Guidelines for instruction set design?

Ken Rose <rose@acm.org>
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:30:55 -0700

          From comp.compilers

Related articles
Guidelines for instruction set design? cyril.cressent@gmail.com (2009-04-30)
Re: Guidelines for instruction set design? rose@acm.org (Ken Rose) (2009-05-01)
Re: Guidelines for instruction set design? kamalpr@gmail.com (2009-05-03)
Re: Guidelines for instruction set design? gneuner2@comcast.net (George Neuner) (2009-05-03)
Re: Guidelines for instruction set design? hsheboul@gmail.com (Hasan Alsheboul) (2009-05-04)
Re: Guidelines for instruction set design? cyril.cressent@gmail.com (2009-05-04)
Re: Guidelines for instruction set design? torbenm@pc-003.diku.dk (2009-05-04)
Re: Guidelines for instruction set design? gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2009-05-05)
[14 later articles]
| List of all articles for this month |

From: Ken Rose <rose@acm.org>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 17:30:55 -0700
Organization: TeraNews.com
References: 09-05-008
Keywords: architecture
Posted-Date: 02 May 2009 18:52:02 EDT

cyril.cressent@gmail.com wrote:


> I was wondering if there are some general guidelines one should
> observe when designing an instruction set so that a C compiler can
> easily be ported to that CPU.


> [Interesting question. C should be pretty straightforward on anything
> with flat byte addressing and enough registers to handle stack frames.
> What makes this architecture hard? -John]


I don't know anything about the poster's instruction set, but from my
own experience, it's a pain to have to have a scratch register to spill,
which makes a register+offset or register+register addressing mode very
handy.


Be careful that the instruction set supports all the branches that C
calls for. For instance, one machine I've worked on doesn't have an
overflow flag, which makes signed comparisons awkward.


    - ken



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