That struck me as very weird as well. I never heard of this CPU, so I looked it up. Turns out it's not supposed to go fast: the designers boast of a tiny implem

That struck me as very weird as well. I never heard of this CPU, so I looked it up. Turns out it's not supposed to go fast: the designers boast of a tiny implementation and dense code, and it only intended for "light administrative tasks". The design is pretty neat. It's a stack machine, no registers, and literally a bytecode: each instruction is 1 byte long. The only exception seems to be a little hack in the IM (push constant) instruction to allow chaining to build long constants.