The Sparc V8 running Solaris took hundreds of clock cycles to handle traps, so some languages actually performed better by ignoring the register windows and avo

The Sparc V8 running Solaris took hundreds of clock cycles to handle traps, so some languages actually performed better by ignoring the register windows and avoiding the overflow/underflow traps. This one bad implementation hurt the reputation of the idea in general even though Sparc V9 improved this significantly. People also like to point out that the original NIOS processor from Altera had register windows but they were eliminated from the NIOS II. What they forget to mention is that Altera claimed this allowed them to make a smaller core "without hurting performance too much". Which means that the register windows version was faster, not slower like they want to imply.