8086 register allocation

From	"Alexei A. Frounze" <alexfrunews@gmail.com>
Newsgroups	comp.compilers
Subject	8086 register allocation
Date	2021-05-09 14:28 -0700
Organization	Compilers Central
Message-ID	<21-05-005@comp.compilers> (permalink)

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For the fun of it I've implemented a greedy bottom-up local register
allocator for the intel 8086 CPU, which is known for its non-uniform
use of registers in ALU instructions and memory operands
(https://github.com/alexfru/regal86).

The motivation for it is that I haven't seen any such register
allocator in e.g. the "Dragon" book and may other texts on compilers
I've read or skimmed. And even today I can't quite come up with a
proper web search request that would return info on such allocators.
I've found one paper that very briefly talks about an allocator like
this for the IBM 370. This gives a sense that this stuff is very
yesterday in terms of both CPU architectures and modern compiler
algorithms since many seem to delegate this particular aspect of
register allocation to graph (pre)coloring and modern CPUs are more
uniform in terms of register use (or there are simply more registers
to use).

Are there any other texts that introduce and explain such register
allocators? Compiler Construction by William M. Waite and Gerhard Goos
(section 10.2.2 "Targeting") is a bit too short on the matter. But
people somehow have done things like this in the past.

Thanks,
Alex
[I don't recall anything in a textbook about it.  x86 register
allocators were pretty ad-hoc due to all of the special cases
where an operand had to be in a specific register. -John]

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8086 register allocation "Alexei A. Frounze" <alexfrunews@gmail.com> - 2021-05-09 14:28 -0700
  Re: 8086 register allocation Fernando <pronesto@gmail.com> - 2021-05-10 04:46 -0700
  Re: 8086 register allocation gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2021-05-10 14:49 -0700
    Re: 8086 register allocation Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2021-05-11 03:35 +0200
      Re: 8086 register allocation gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2021-05-10 21:19 -0700
      Re: 8086 register allocation Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2021-05-11 09:35 +0200
    Re: 8086 register allocation Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> - 2021-05-11 06:44 +0000

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