Empirical analysis of the mesa instruction set

Abstract

This paper describes recent work to refine the instruction set of the Mesa processor. Mesa [8] is a high level systems implementation language developed at Xerox PARC during the middle 1970's. Typical systems written in Mesa are large collections of programs running on single-user machines. For this reason, a major design goal of the project has been to generate compact object programs. The computers that execute Mesa programs are implementations of a stack architecture [5]. The instructions of an object program are organized into a stream of eight bit bytes. The exact complement into of instructions in the architecture has changed as the language and machine micro architecture have evolved. In Sections 3 and 4, we give a short history of the Mesa instruction set and discuss the motivation for our most recent analysis of it. In Section 5, we discuss the tools and techniques used in this analysis. Section 6 shows the results of this analysis as applied to a large sample of approximately 2.5 million instruction bytes. Sections 7 and 8 give advice to others who might be contemplating similar analyses.