Building the fastest Lua interpreter automatically

> For example, at LLVM IR level, it is trivial to make a function use GHC calling convention (a convention with no callee-saved registers)

This refers to the following section of [1]

“cc 10” - GHC convention This calling convention has been implemented specifically for use by the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). It passes everything in registers, going to extremes to achieve this by disabling callee save registers. This calling convention should not be used lightly but only for specific situations such as an alternative to the register pinning performance technique often used when implementing functional programming languages. At the moment only X86 supports this convention and it has the following limitations:

On X86-32 only supports up to 4 bit type parameters. No floating-point types are supported. On X86-64 only supports up to 10 bit type parameters and 6 floating-point parameters. This calling convention supports tail call optimization but requires both the caller and callee are using it.

[1] https://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#calling-conventions

People who focus on JIT often focus on the JIT and not the interpreter. Which is a shame because if you make the uncommon paths cheaper then you can tune your code for the hot paths a bit more aggressively. You get fewer situations where you are sacrificing Best Case for Average Case performance.