[Python-Dev] Parrot -- should life imitate satire?

[Tim Peters]

[Eric S. Raymond]
> ...
> (and, incidentally, argued that the bytecode should emulate a stack
> rather than a register machine because the cost/speed disparities that
> justify register architectures in hardware don't exist in a software
> VM).

Don't get too married to that!  My bet is that if anyone had time for it,
we'd switch the Python VM today to a register model; Skip Montanaro's
Rattlesnake project was aiming at that, but fizzled out due to lack of time.

The per-opcode fetch-decode-dispatch overhead is very high in SW too, so a
register VM can win simply by cutting the number of opcodes needed to
accomplish a given bit of useful work.  Indeed, eliding SET_LINENO opcodes
is the primary reason Python -O runs faster, yet all it saves is one trip
around the eval loop per source-code line (the *body* of SET_LINENO is just
a test, branch, and store -- it's trivial compared to the overhead of
getting to it).

Variants of forth-like threading are alternatives to both.