Chapter 13

1. There are many new concepts in native code. These include many kinds and sizes of registers and main memory access modes. Choosing from many possible underlying instruction sequences is also important.
2. Even with the runtime addition required, addresses that are stored as offsets relative to the instruction pointer may be more compact and may take advantage of instruction prefetching in the pipelined architecture, to provide faster access to global variables than specifying them using absolute addresses.
3. Function call speed is important because modern software is often organized into many frequently called tiny functions. The x64 architecture performs fast function calls if functions take advantage of passing the first six parameters in registers. Several aspects of x64 architecture seem to have the potential to reduce execution speed, such as a need to save and restore large numbers of registers to memory before and after a call.