As a hobbyist I agree that generating code for stack machines is much easier than for register machines. Because you get to ignore register allocation entirely!

As a hobbyist I agree that generating code for stack machines is much easier than for register machines. Because you get to ignore register allocation entirely! I hate register allocation (implementing it I mean). But it's normally agreed to be less efficient. See Y Shi's 2005 paper Virtual Machine Showdown: > We found that a register architecture requires an average of 47% fewer executed VM instructions, and that the re- sulting register code is 25% larger than the correpsonding stack code. The increased cost of fetching more VM code due to larger code size involves only 1.07% extra real ma- chine loads per VM instruction eliminated. On a Pentium 4 machine, the register machine required 32.3% less time to execute standard benchmarks if dispatch is performed using a C switch statement. Even if more efficient threaded dis- patch is available (which requires labels as first class values), the reduction in running time is still around 26.5% for the register architecture.