Re: [Mesa3d-dev] codegen again

[Jeff E. <je...@in...>]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 12:57:52AM -0400, Josh Vanderhoof wrote:
> Allen Akin <ak...@po...> writes:
> 
> > Also, my personal bias would be to use an input representation that's
> > more abstract than MIPS-like virtual-machine instructions.  That makes
> > it easier to optimize the output code if you like, and needn't have a
> > huge impact on compilation time if optimization is turned off.  I
> > acknowledge this can become a tarpit, though.
> 
> I'm surprised they went for only 6 registers.  Most virtual machines
> go the other way and give you a huge number of registers.  It seems
> like it would be hard to get good performance with such a small number
> of registers.  (Although it would be possible to create a pentium pro
> style register renamer to at least get some use of the extra registers
> available on non x86 processors.)

In fact, I suspect the number 6 was chosen so that a naive code
generator could still work for x86.

Jeff