An anomaly in an interpreter using GCC source-code-level register allocation

Authors:
Ting-Wei Hou;Fuh-Gwo Chen
Affiliations:
National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City, Taiwan, R.O.C.;National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City, Taiwan, R.O.C.
Venue:
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
Year:
2007

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Communications of the ACM
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ACM SIGPLAN Notices

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Abstract

An anomaly of unexpected performance in an interpreter whose frequently accessed variables are manually assigned to hard registers by GCC source-code-level register allocation is presented. A hard-registered virtual program counter and stack pointer as well as a byte-code translation are experimented on both register-rich PowerPC and register-limited Intel x86. According to the study of the anomaly, a hard register should not be assigned singly to a variable in an interpreter due to higher register pressure.