It's satisfying that you were able to say "There's a good chance you're wrong, here's why" and then be confirmed by testing. You obviously have a great deal of experience with low-level programming; relatively rare, nowadays. Mine comes from graphics programming.
Also, which article are you referring to? Any keywords I can search for?
But after looking at tinyvm it may be a special animal. The native implementation of its virtual opcodes are only one or two instructions. Locality, cacheing, and pipelining are working at their finest here and it might be best to just let them do their thing.
It's satisfying that you were able to say "There's a good chance you're wrong, here's why" and then be confirmed by testing. You obviously have a great deal of experience with low-level programming; relatively rare, nowadays. Mine comes from graphics programming.
Also, which article are you referring to? Any keywords I can search for?