> I don't quite see how it can be architecture independent if it doesn't do register allocation. Does it use a small fixed amount of virtual registers which wor

> I don't quite see how it can be architecture independent if it doesn't do register allocation. Does it use a small fixed amount of virtual registers which work on every target? Or does it spill virtual registers to memory if required? This is pretty common in low tech compilers as well. Basically you assume just a few registers, and have some templates for various code sequences that compute a result and push it onto a stack, or that sort of thing. The code you get is way less efficient than an optimizing compiler would produce, but it beats most interpreters. GNU Lightning is a similar sort of JIT compiler.