Re: Why I've Dropped In

On Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:17:21 +0000, Stefan Monnier wrote:

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that it doesn't have to be too bad:
e.g. if you reduce register-specifiers to just 4bits for a 32-register
architecture and kind of "randomize" which of the 16 values refer to
which of the 32 registers for each instruction, it's fairly easy to
adjust a register allocator to handle this correctly (assuming you
choose your instructions beforehand, you simply mark, for each
instructions, the unusable registers as "interfering"), and the end
result is often almost as good as if you had 5bits to specify
the registers.

No doubt this is an intriguing theoretical possibility, but even I would
shrink from inflicting something so bizarre upon programmers and
compiler writers.
John Savard