Spoon progress 15 January 2006: new minimum, new system tracer

[Bert Freudenberg]

Am 16.01.2006 um 04:50 schrieb Craig Latta:

>
> Hi all--
>
> 	I've reached a new minimum snapshot size (167,224 bytes  
> uncompressed, the previous one from 2003 was 211,504 bytes  
> uncompressed).

Great! :)

> 	That's for a system which supports remote browsing. I've also  
> conceived a new design for the system tracer, one that implements  
> it as a feature of the simulator (which didn't exist when the  
> current tracer was written). With this tracer one will be able to  
> write new snapshots without having to trace the object memory in  
> which the tracer is running, and with certainty that every object  
> in the result was required for an interpreter to function.

Reminds me of Pypy - they also trace execution, but symbolically  
(taking both arms of each branch). There's a paper on it, "Compiling  
Dynamic Language Implementations" (http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/ 
pypy/doc/index-report.html)

Though I'm sure your's is at least two orders of magnitude simpler,  
i.e., better ;-)

- Bert -