On: A Friendly Introduction to Assembly for High-Level...

[aleden]

Are delay slots unique to mips? They're a pretty significant aspect (complication) that I don't see anywhere else.

Also, the gp register- don't know of any other arch where you need to set something like that up to access global variables. It's another layer of indirection which makes the assembly code harder to read (especially PIC code that works off of the value of the t9 register)

[drmpeg → aleden]

SPARC has delay slots. Here's some code. The clr %o3 and restore %o0 are in the delay slots.

    10082410   9de3bf98      save        %sp, 0xffffff98, %sp
    10082414   90102001      mov         1, %o0
    10082418   92100018      mov         %i0, %o1
    1008241c   94100019      mov         %i1, %o2
    10082420   7fffff17      call        dirList
    10082424   96102000      clr         %o3
    10082428   81c7e008      ret
    1008242c   91e80008      restore     %o0

[TapamN → aleden]

>Are delay slots unique to mips?

No, several other architectures of that period have delay slots (80s/90s), and modern VLIWs/DSPs still often have them. Sometimes the slots longer than a single instruction.