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Asked: 2026-05-23T03:14:46+00:00

When designing a byte code interpreter, is there a consensus these days on whether

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When designing a byte code interpreter, is there a consensus these days on whether stack or three address format (or something else?) is better? I’m looking at these considerations:

  1. The objective language is a dynamic language fairly similar to Javascript.

  2. Performance is important, but development speed and portability are more so for the moment.

  3. Therefore the implementation will be strictly an interpreter for the time being; a JIT compiler may come later, resources permitting.

  4. The interpreter will be written in C.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Take a look at the OCaml bytecode interpreter – it’s one of the fastest of its kind. It is pretty much a stack machine, translated into a threaded code on loading (using the GNU computed goto extension). You can generate a Forth-like threaded code as well, should be relatively easy to do.

    But if you’re keeping a future JIT compilation in mind, make sure that your stack machine is not really a full-featured stack machine, but an expression tree serialisation form instead (like .NET CLI) – this way you’d be able to translate your “stack” bytecode into a 3-address form and then into an SSA.

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