[carbonica]

It's close to the same thing, but having more named registers does provide more optimization opportunities. It shouldn't be completely ignored as a good thing.

I mentioned function calls because that's a boundary when an optimizer - either in-processor or in-compiler - is often forced to use memory and not registers. The big-N-register "register window" of RISC processors kicks this problem's ass. But with aggressive inlining already common, these boundaries don't come up as often as you'd think. So the x86-64 calling convention does a pretty damn good job too.

Edit: by the way, I guess I haven't really commenting on TinyVM one way or the other when I responded to you. You're absolutely right and the compatibility is not necessary at all. I think the register count limitation especially is just silly. I pointed out in a different thread that they could double their register count and they'd still fit in a single cache line... they even already have a naming convention (r08-r15) they can hijack.