> I don’t see how a stack-based architecture avoids the need to think about register sizes. You just get equivalent questions, like - what sizes of integers do

> I don’t see how a stack-based architecture avoids the need to think about register sizes. You just get equivalent questions, like - what sizes of integers do you have primitive ops for? do you have separate pop/swap/drop/etc. for every possible size, and if not, what’s the standard size of a stack item? This is correct. But these are still less decisions, e.g. - no number of registers, - no reinterpretation of parts of registers, - SIMD fits the stack-based model rather badly, - stack-based VM instruction sets are typically of the kind "take two values from top of stack, do something with it and push back" (very inspired by Forth - but I don't know much Forth), see for example for the Java bytecode instructions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_bytecode_instruction_listings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_bytecode_instruction_list...) or CIL instructions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIL_instructions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIL_instructions and http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/3/3/733ad403-90b2-4064-a81e-01035a7fe13c/ms%20partition%20iii.pdf http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/3/3/733ad403-90b2-4...), so no worry about 2-operand vs 3-operand instructions.