Reply To: Is binary Translating i386/x86_64 to mill code practical?

Probably not.

Directly simulating a general-register machine requires a way to preserve updateable state that in the target would be in registers. The only updateable state on a Mill is memory, so performance would be abysmal. Then there would be problems providing the x86 memory semantics, which are weaker than a Mill.

But more to the point: binary translation has gotten pretty good these days, so there seems little reason to directly interpret any other chip’s native instruction set. We expect to include a (verrry slow) interpreter for use with device ROMs that contain x86 code when the device is needed by the BIOS. Or maybe we can avoid the problem some other way; hard to tell until we get further along.