Well, at least in the area of virtual machines and interpreters, the usual argument goes like this: A stack-based virtual machine architecture has compact code

Well, at least in the area of virtual machines and interpreters, the usual argument goes like this: A stack-based virtual machine architecture has compact code representation (only bytecodes) where operands are pushed onto and popped of the corresponding argument stack. Register based VM-architectures require you to encode source and destination registers into the operations. IIRC, for Java bytecode, going from a stack-based representation to a register-based virtual machine grew the code size by more than 40%. But on the other hand interpretation got more efficient, since you have less instructions overall and thus fewer instruction dispatches. If you want more details I'll gladly point you to the excellent and canonical reference for this: Shi, Casey, Ertl and Gregg: "Virtual machine showdown: Stack versus registers." TACO http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1328195.1328197 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1328195.1328197 (There is also the journal article's predecessor from VEE05, https://www.usenix.org/events/vee05/full_papers/p153-yunhe.pdf https://www.usenix.org/events/vee05/full_papers/p153-yunhe.p...)