Hi folks!
This post is a just a "heads up" based on some websurfing around VMs and JITs. I am itching badly to hear Eliot announce some kind of Cog-thingy - so consider this rambling post to be a symptom of that itch. :)
There are a few things going on in the VM world that most of us have no clues about. We know about V8 but most may not know about TraceMonkey/Tamarin and its use of a new technique called "tracing" and a backing library for it - nanojit.
Evidently TraceMonkey is giving V8 a real run for its money, and AFAICT this is mainly due to work of Andreas Gal (really interesting long article):
http://andreasgal.com/2008/08/22/tracing-the-web
And some other:
http://www.bailopan.net/blog/?p=72
Hot off the press (yesterday):
http://www.bailopan.net/blog/?p=430
After having read that Eliot does not think LLVM is suitable mainly due to lack of large basic blocks in Smalltalk code - and he seems to be looking hard at Factor and its JIT - I just wanted to mention the above as Yet Another Interesting Bit. I also think that the latest work on Lua (LuaJIT) includes tracing, not sure though.
So Eliot, how is your work progressing? No pressure, just LOTS of interest! :)
regards, Göran
PS. Being bored hacking C#...