Re: Guidelines for instruction set design?

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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