5 ms·
Performance. It takes longer to access performance critical data on a stack machine compared to a register machine. You spend a lot of cycles rolling the stack
by rahen 4y ago
Performance. It takes longer to access performance critical data on a stack machine compared to a register machine. You spend a lot of cycles rolling the stack to retrieve the value you need.
On the other hand, the circuitry is simpler and implementing a compiler for such an architecture is close to trivial.
Early stack computers, especially from Burroughs, were the first to be mainly programmed in a high level language, assembly was barely used if at all. This was revolutionary at the time.
- Veliladon 4y agoOnly if you're reading directly from memory. Most stack machines will have a scratchpad of 16 values that are on chip much like registers. In the case of something like x87 you can even arbitrarily exchange them.
- vitiral 4y agoPerformance as in operations per second. I believe power performance, operations / transistor and many other metrics are better on stack machines.
- pjmlp 4y agoBurroughs doesn't do Assembly at all, all the CPU primitives are available as ESPOL/NEWP intrisics.