That's called "Subroutine threading"! :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code#Subroutine_threading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code#Subroutin

That's called "Subroutine threading"! :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code#Subroutine_threading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code#Subroutine_threa... V8's Ignition interpreter is implemented with "Direct threading", which is quite similar but (probably?) faster on modern processors-- it does an indirect jump to the next bytecode handler instead of a return: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10034167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10034167 "The bytecode handlers are not intended to be called directly, instead each bytecode handler dispatches to the next bytecode. Bytecode dispatch is implemented as a tail call operation in TurboFan. The interpreter loads the next bytecode, indexes into the dispatch table to get the code object of the target bytecode handler, and then tail calls the code object to dispatch to the next bytecode handler."