How to devise instruction set of a stack based machine?

Posted by Anindya Chatterjee on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Anindya Chatterjee
Published on 2012-06-29T11:06:46Z Indexed on 2012/06/29 15:22 UTC
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Stack based virtual machines like CLR and JVM has different set of instructions. Is there any theory behind devising the instruction set while creating a virtual machine? e.g. there are JVM instruction sets to load constants from 0-5 onto the stack

iconst_0
iconst_1
iconst_2
iconst_3
iconst_4
iconst_5

whereas in CLR there are instruction set to load number from 0 to 8 onto the stack as follows

ldc.i4.0
ldc.i4.1
ldc.i4.2
ldc.i4.3
ldc.i4.4
ldc.i4.5
ldc.i4.6
ldc.i4.7
ldc.i4.8

why there is no ldc.i4.9 and if ldc.i4 is there why we need the above opcodes? And there are others like these.

I am eager to know what is the reason behind this difference between opcodes of different VMs? Is there any specific theory to devise these opcodes or it is totally driven by the characteristics of the VM itself or depends on the high-level language constructs?

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