benke_g

There could be a point in having a utf8 <-> utf32 pair of instructions as the hardware is trivial and the software isn’t given that this encoding is winning terrain and bogs down string searches everywhere. Obvoiusly these would be two output operations as we need to know how many bytes were consumed/produced. Just the count output would be useful for strlen applications. That said it is really a wart for an instruction set…

Thanks for the explanation on how the belt is actually a description of how to flip the switches in a big crossbar. Now I just wonder what happens to retiring values that are not immediately used, but instead needed in later cycles. Won’t these have to be held temporarily somewhere, thus increasing the number of inputs to the crossbar by at least the belt length (for the worst case).