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Due to alignment requirements and low-tag codes, it is not possible to use a hardware call instruction to compute the LRA. Instead the LRA for a call is computed by doing an add-immediate to the start of the code data-block.
An advantage of using a single data-block to represent both the descriptor and non-descriptor parts of a function is that both can be represented by a single pointer. This reduces the number of memory accesses that have to be done in a full call. For example, since the constant pool is implicit in an LRA, a call need only save the LRA, rather than saving both the return PC and the constant pool.