(Apologies if you're seeing this twice. I first posted to the discourse instance.)
I first worked on a register-based virtual machine in the 1.5.2 timeframe. That was before PEP 227 (closures) landed. Prior to that, local variables and the stack were contiguous in the f_localsplus array. Based on a comment at the time from Tim Peters (which I recall but can no longer find), the number of required registers won’t be any greater than the maximum extent of the stack. (It makes sense, and worked for me at the time.) That allowed me to repurpose the stack space as my registers and treat the full f_localsplus array as a single large “register file,” eliminating LOAD_FAST_REG and STORE_FAST_REG instructions completely, which I believe was a major win. I want to rearrange the current f_localsplus to make locals and stack neighbors again. My first look at the code suggested there is no good reason it can’t be done, but figured Jeremy Hylton must have had a good reason to prefer the current layout which places cells and frees in the middle. While the necessary changes didn’t look extensive, they did look a bit tedious to get right, which I have confirmed. My first attempt to reorganize f_localsplus from locals/cells/frees/stack to locals/stack/cells/frees has been an abysmal failure. I’ve found a couple mistakes and corrected them. Implementing those corrections caused the types of failures to change (convincing me they were necessary), but did not eliminate them entirely (so, necessary, but not sufficient). I’ve clearly missed something. I’m also fairly ignorant about recent changes to the language (big understatement), so thought that before going any further, I would see if anyone with better current knowledge of frame objects knew of a reason why my desired layout change wouldn’t work. Skip _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/NWQKIDC2IZXJZFQPJDYAWIWNKYUHCSH3/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
