Re: Register VM WIP

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Noah Lavine <address@hidden> skribis:

> I think what Andy is proposing to do is to get rid of the
> temporary-variable stack and operate directly on the local-variable
> stack. We shouldn't think of these registers as being like machine
> registers, and in fact maybe "registers" is not a good name for these
> objects. They are really just variables in the topmost stack frame.

Yeah, I too was confused the first time I heard about “register VMs.”

The key idea is that opcodes encode the offset of the operand they work
on, rather than working only on the last words of the stack (for example,
‘add x y’ instead of ‘local-ref x’ + ‘local-ref y’ + ‘add’ + ‘local-set x’.)

Thanks,
Ludo’.