[ANN]Draft rough plan for 3.6!

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Tue Apr 15 01:47:48 UTC 2003


"Andreas Raab" <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:

> Hi Anthony,
> 
> > I think we should abandon the VI4 idea (image format changes) for now
> > and just stick with the Closure Compiler which works with the current
> > image. 
> 
> Not good for the long-term as it is pretty slow. My inclination has been
> that the ability to use the closure compiler is a bridge towards VI4 not a
> permanent solution.
That's certainly how I'd see it. The fact that it works reasonably well
is great but there is definitely more that could be done by adding a few
more bytecodes and/or primitives  and/or more block optimizing etc.

The major format change intended for VI4 is the compiled method clean up
from several years ago. Having a format break provides us with an
opportunity to clean up some other uglinesses as well and according to
some old discussions with IanP would help with making a cleaner jitter
someday. It also appears to improve performance a few percent on it's
own. Some of the VM cleanups will reduce the VM size (as mentioned in
another thread) and slighlty reduce the maintenance costs of the VM.

The _down_ side is the loss of backwards compatability with all those
old images - but then they will still run on older VMs so maybe that
is not such a big problem. Really the only thing in the way is finally
making a decision to go forwards. Guides? Dan? Ted? Alan? Andreas?
Anyone?

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- An 8080 in a StrongARM environment.



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