If you want the fastest possible speed, what you need is a technique called dynamic recompilation. Essentially, you compile the 6502 opcodes (or whatever) to n

If you want the fastest possible speed, what you need is a technique called dynamic recompilation. Essentially, you compile the 6502 opcodes (or whatever) to native x86_64 code, and execute that. It's considered the gold standard of emulation. Nowadays, it's usually done by using LLVM to generate bytecode, and jumping to that. By the way, I did enjoy reading your link about computed gotos. It sounds like what it comes down to is that the C switch statement does bounds checking, and the computed goto can avoid that. At the end of the day, though, no matter how many hacks you pile on, using an interpreter will have an overhead above dynorec. N.B. Tail call optimization has its costs as well as benefits. Rust recently announced that it won't be supporting it. I don't know if the Go guys have made any statement about this, but I would imagine they might not consider it, for the same reasons. More here: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-April/003557.html https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-April/00355...