On
This is anecdotal (I wasn't involved), and because I wasn't involved, my memory is doubly foggy, BUT: Dave Patterson
That would be Dave Ungar :-)
So, if you ever wondered why ParcPlace/Objectworks Smalltalk, and other Smalltalks that do JIT compiling of methods into native code, do so well on SPARC machines, now you know.
Oddly enough none of the sparc tag stuff turned out to help us with that particular code generator; and the register windows stuff caused so much hassle I think it was ignored as much as possible. It's so long ago now I can barely even recall any details. I do remember a chip step that changed the cache clearing instruction from closed interval to semi-closed so that we had a terrifyingly tricky to debug case where just occasionally the i-cache flush (after generating machine code for a method) didn't flush out the last word any more and so the generated code was wrong *on reload*. I think several weeks of brain-banging resulted.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Useful random insult:- One flower short of an arrangement.