>>71
register spill
That is a "RISCism", if you are thinking that way then you are not using x86 the way it was meant to be used. Most if not all operations can be register-memory, and the portion of memory around the stack pointer can be accessed basically at near-register speeds, so you can think of that as another few dozen 32-bit registers. EAX and EDX should be used for accumulation, EBX, ESI, and EDI pointers, and ECX loop counters.
How much of your precious instruction density savings is spent by the additional instructions you must add to twiddle values about that tiny register set?
Most register-register operations are 2 bytes, register-memory via [ebp+d8] is 3 bytes. If you need to do many operations in parallel then start considering MMX and SSE.
>>69
The CS academics love to bash it because they are abstractionists with their heads in the clouds and enjoy dreaming about "elegant" bullshit, while they complain about all the aspects of x86 they hate because they don't understand that those arose from practical considerations and just scream about it being too complex. Meanwhile the hardware designers have no problems with that complexity because it
works well and they continue improving on the design by making it more complex. If you think x86 is ugly then you should think the same of the human genome, natural languages, or anything else that's evolved a long way; they're still around,
because everything else failed.
http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/x86.html