...which is true, but doesn't mean you can just ignore it. Interpreter state is among the most frequently accessed memory in many applications, meaning it's id

...which is true, but doesn't mean you can just ignore it. Interpreter state is among the most frequently accessed memory in many applications, meaning it's ideal to have it in cache. The difference between two interpreter states and one might not be big compared to the data being processed, but it's big enough to bump a lot of interpreter state out of cache, which for many programs can have drastic performance implications. If you don't think cache locality is important, look at radix sort versus quicksort. Radix sort has a much lower O, but performs worse in most cases because of its poor cache locality. Look, I get that there are fairly easy ways to work around these problems, but let's not just blithely pretend they aren't problems.