Saturday, December 12, 2009

Is it time to go stackless?

As a follow-up on Guy Steele's post on tail recursion referenced on my last one and Cook's paper, there's another interesting post by Gilad Bracha that made me wonder: is it time to go stackless?

The stack, as an optimization for call convention is deeply rooted into greatly extended instruction sets. But now, with the amounts of RAM and CPU power available and the really cheap short-lived object allocation time in modern VMs, I think we could afford it, at least for high level languages.

Back in my Python days, I remember Stackless Python, an implementation of this programming language with support for continuations, generators and coroutines.

And this would be only the beginning...

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