On Sun, 24 May 1998, Alexei Kosut wrote:
> It seems to me that if function call overhead (which is, after all, just a
> few machine instructions) is something we need to worry about on a given
> architecture, then we should take all the CPUs and squish them, and force
> people to buy computers that make sense. Whose bright idea was it to give
> the x86 only 16 registers anyway? SPARC has 40. PA-RISC chips have 72. And
> those are only the integer ones.
Yea, but they _need_ more because you need to use registers more.
Trying to figure out why the x86 does certain things certain ways can be a
quite entertaining history lesson.
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