Re: Towards a faster interpreter

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> I have been thinking of ways of making the Ravi interpreter faster
> without having to resort to assembly code etc. So far one of the areas
> I have not really looked at is how to improve the bytecode decoding.
> The main issue is that the operands B and C require an extra bit
> compared to operand A, so we cannot make them all 8 bits...

Given a 32- or 64-bit machine, why decoding 8-bit operands would be
faster/better than 9-bit ones?

-- Roberto