Alan Grimes <alangrimes at starpower.net> wrote:

> 2. The use of a base pointer is OK on 64-bit platforms because A. you 
> need to, and B. 64-bit platforms have enough registers to use it 
> efficiently. However, using a base-index system on 32-bit platforms 
> would be a major pessimization... =\
That depends upon the cpu/architecture being used. There are actually a
lot of us that don't use the vile waste of perfectly good sand known as
'x86'. In fact, _most_ 32bit cpu architectures have a reasonable number
of registers; I may be missing some out but so far as I can recall
_only_ x86 is so broken as to have a serious shortage.

C'mon Alan - if you've done the OS design work you mentioned previously
you surely know this. Repeat after me "Windows is not the only OS, x86
is not the only cpu".

tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: EIV: Erase IPL Volume