> VM takes care not to let them clobber. The Erlang VM absolutely clobbers registers within functions all the time, since there are only 64? of them and they a

> VM takes care not to let them clobber. The Erlang VM absolutely clobbers registers within functions all the time, since there are only 64? of them and they are a 'limited' resource. My point is that the logic to efficiently move data around is more complicated when you don't know the arity ahead of time. You can't, for example, keep a register file as a linear slice. You have to allocate a whole slate of 64 registers on each call with the last (n) registers blanked.