Question

Many programming language runtime environments use stacks as their primary storage structure (e.g. see JVM bytecode to runtime example).

Quickly recalling I see following advantages:

• Simple structure (pop/push), trivial to implement
• Most processors are anyway optimized for stack operations, so it is very fast
• Less problems with memory fragmentation, it is always about moving memory-pointer up and down for allocation and freeing complete blocks of memory by resetting the pointer to the last entry offset.

Is the list complete or did I miss something? Are there programming language runtime environments which are not using stacks for storage at all?

Answer 1

Just decided to include a link to one of the most insightful developers alive (and active), the architect of hotspot JVM:

When you compare the speed & power of
a CPU executing bytecodes, you’ll see
lots of hardware complexity around the
basic execution issues (I’m skipping
on lots of obvious examples, but
here’s one: the stack layout sucks for
wide-issue because of direct stack
dependencies).

http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff-click/2010-04-21-un-bear-able