wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) (02/09/91)
> Given an indirect threaded FORTH for a RISC-procesor (R3000 or i860). > What is the best implementation (concerning speed) for Top-of-Stack, My experience agrees with Phil Koopman's. In both my C Forth 83 and Sun Forth-SPARC implementations, TOS in a register was worth about 10%, and using more than one stack cache register was more trouble than I was willing to undertake. In the Sun Forth-SPARC case, if I had it to do over again, I would not have put the top of the stack in a register. In my judgement, the 10% speed advantage was not worth the trouble of explaining to users how to manage the TOS register inside CODE words. Speed isn't everything. Mitch Bradley, wmb@Eng.Sun.COM