The Art of Picking Intel Registers (2003)

>"There are three major processor architectures: register, stack, and accumulator. In a register architecture, operations such as addition or subtraction can occur between any two arbitrary registers. In a stack architecture, operations occur between the top of the stack and other items on the stack. In an accumulator architecture, the processor has single calculation register called the accumulator." I have only ever seen register and stack used to distinguish between a virtual machine implementation - i.e a…

Oh this fills me with a mix of nostalgia and dread. The first time I saw a 'flat' instruction set such as MIPS and ARM, with a large file of registers that are treated the same, was really refreshing.

> Using registers according to Intel's original plan allows the code to take full advantage of these optimizations. Unfortunately, this seems to be a lost art. Few coders are aware of Intel's overall design, and most compilers are too the simplistic or focused on execution speed to use the registers properly. Note carefully that the context here is size optimisation only. When they talk about 'optimised' they just mean smaller code. The advice is pre-historic and counter-productive for all other…