Re: Stack based machines

Linus Thand <thand@pmail.net> wrote:
> What is happening in the world of stack-based machines?
> Are there any active groups working on processors or
> compilers (I'm especially interested in functional languages).
>
> [Other than forth, not much I'm aware of. Registers give an architecture
> a big performance boost, and it's hard to fake that by caching to top of
> the stack. -John]


Well, there's the whole Java thing and Sun making
those processor cores: {micro,pico,ultra}Java which
I believe are all stack machines. I do remember
reading a design document from Sun a long time back
which described mapping the top elements of the stack
to registers in at least one of these processors.


Manoj
[There have been lots of stack architectures that kept the top of the
stack in registers, but it's my impression that performance is worse
than real registers. Registers hold common subexpression values and
hot loop variables as well as expression temporaries, and stack
caching doesn't easily get either of those. -John]

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