@lizzie :neocat_thonk: there might be more memory pressure overall, since they tend to have a lot more instructions and tend to be bigger programs. but i'm told pipelining often undoes the performance issue because they are always the same size, so the hardware is able to shuttle it around and decode it behind the run head or something.

you only pay for registers you move and more registers means more temporaries without touching stack, so a function with 2 inputs and 1 output doesn't really care about the amount of registers in the call frame, since it will just leave the ones it doesn't use alone