What opcode dispatch strategies are used in efficient interpreters?

Question

What techniques promote efficient opcode dispatch to make a fast interpreter? Are there some techniques that only work well on modern hardware and others that don\'t work we

Answer 1

I found an blog post on threaded interpreter implementation that was useful.

The author describes GCC label-based threading and also how to do this in Visual Studio using inline assembler.

http://abepralle.wordpress.com/2009/01/25/how-not-to-make-a-virtual-machine-label-based-threading/

The results are interesting. He reports 33% performance improvement when using GCC but surprisingly the Visual Studio inline assembly implementation is 3 times slower!