Reply To: Metadata

Thanks for the explanation. As currently defined, the Mill doesn’t handle this use-case well. Needs thought.

Your suggestion of a few user-accessible registers does not work well, because then there is the problem of what happens if more than one operation writes them, and write->read latencies, and so on; all the hazards and everything else about general registers that the belt avoids. The last thing we want to do is to re-introduce renaming into a Mill just to support Lisp 🙂

The existing specRegs don’t have this problem, because they are all read-only w/r/t the application. Yes, they change, but only as a side effect of operations that the hardware knows about, like call and return.

Values swapped to the spiller effectively cost nothing unless you swap the spiller’s bandwidth; that’s easy to do in a test case (a function with a very large number of arguments that recurses as soon as called) but is unseen in practice. Scratchpad is not free – the spill and fill operations cost slots and entropy, and the size of scratchpad has a hardware maximum.

We have considered having a set of globals, or something like a global scratchpad. The problem is the save/restore cost in turf switch, which can be very frequent on a Mill. We decided to defer the idea until we had hard simulation numbers showing what the cost of not having them was.