The theory that stacks are better than registers for an interpreter was pretty conclusively disproven by the Lua 5.0 interpreter. See https://www.lua.org/doc/ju

The theory that stacks are better than registers for an interpreter was pretty conclusively disproven by the Lua 5.0 interpreter. See https://www.lua.org/doc/jucs05.pdf https://www.lua.org/doc/jucs05.pdf (summary: although decode is slightly more expensive per opcode, you have half as many opcodes to decode on average because you get rid of all the stack manipulation instructions)