Life without C [was: VM improvement: speeding up failingcalls...]

Dan Ingalls Dan.Ingalls at disney.com
Mon Feb 14 18:05:13 UTC 2000


>> In place of portability through a C compiler for every platform,  
>you have an
>> instruction set table for each processor.  Native code generation  
>in place of the
>> C translator, and the native code generator is all written in  
>Squeak (SLANG
>> actually).  ...And Squeak runs as (J3-style) native code all the time. 
>
>Hmm, I just don't see how Andrew's concern about code-generation  
>quality is addressed.
>
>Maybe I am too deep inside the box...

You and me both ;-).

I was just reflecting at a higher level about our current intermediate generation of C code, which Andrew argues, and I agree, is a Good Thing.  And my reflection was simply that there might be other Good Things in our future.

Regarding code generation, I think that any decent code generator for a decent native code translator will beat any C compiler's translation of any bytecode interpreter.  So in thinking about oranges instead of apples, I wasn't focussing on the apples vs apples issues of C code generation.

	- Dan






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