Comment by MaxBarraclough
3 hours ago
If it were practical and if there were significant performance benefits (on modern heavyweight CPUs) to tailoring the calling convention on a per-function basis, I'd expect to see it done in optimising JIT engines like Java HotSpot. As far as I know, they don't bother.
I'm no expert but I suspect jcranmer's comment has it right that you end up doing cross-function register-allocation while foregoing the other benefits of just inlining. I also suspect the payoff would be minimal on modern heavyweight hardware. I can see it making more of a difference on a very minimal embedded processor, or if optimising for the smallest binary possible.
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