[Vm-dev] Spur Object 64 bit format

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr.]

Eliot Miranda wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 3:56 AM, Clément Bera wrote:
> > By the way as you are talking about Immediate objects tags and Spur's object
> > representation, I read on other VMs reports that it is faster in overall performance
> > to have pointers tagged with the xxx1 and SmallIntegers tagged with xxx0,
> > because SmallIntegers arithmetics is then much faster.
> 
> I'm sure that was true 20 years ago when register operations were about the
> same speed as memory operations.  But now that memory operations are at
> least an order of magnitude slower I suspect that adjusting the tags (all register
> operations) are in the noise.  But I agree it *would* be interesting to measure.

Another issue is that the 680x0 had addressing modes that aren't common
on current processors. Having SmallIntegers be xxx0 means you don't have
to untag them to add or subtract and then retag them. Shifts and
multiplies require a single scaling factor beyond the basic operation.
But the xxx1 for OOPs introduce complications: if you are going to
access a fixed instance variable, for example instance variable 3, then
you can deal with it at assembly time:

  MOVE.L (-1+4*(3+1),A5),D1 ; where A5 is the OOP

But if you are going to access a field in an Array then you have to do
it at runtime:

  MOVE.L (-1+4*FixedFields,A5,D2*4),D1  ; where A5 is the OOP and D2 is
the index

While it takes several instructions to do the same thing on a current
processor, the 680X0 took quite a few clock cycles to execute the single
instruction above and it took several words in memory to encode it, so
the gain was mostly imaginary.

-- Jecel