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The idea of higher abstraction goes back to Pascal interpreter byte codes (called P code)
in the 1970s. Advantage for business is that making P code eliminates any advantage
for higher skilled (and higher paid) programmers. Advantage of program and programmer
specific knowledge was defended by Peter Naur in his 2005 Turing award lecture.
P code disappeared because of Bell Labs and DEC that sadly are gone. The old DEC
alpha allowed experts to generate much better code than X86s because branch prediction
and some pipeline control was available in machine code to the compiler writer.
I bet the Apple bits intermediate code does not code this information.
An example from Intel X86s is that machine instructions containing constants
are much faster than index reg instructions. It is worth generating that intermediate
code pattern intio the flow graph intermediate form (probably not codable into bits).
Even lower power use would be possible if programmer (code generator) instruction
ability to control and turrn off power use in a system.
