[Q] Status of blocks

Anthony Hannan ajh18 at cornell.edu
Thu Jan 16 04:22:29 UTC 2003


"Swan, Dean" <Dean_Swan at Mitel.COM> wrote:
> Please pardon my ignorance, but if Anthony's VI4 work
> is done, includes block closures and is faster than the
> stock VM, why is there reluctance to take it as a whole?

Well, its not totally done.  Primarily, loading old image-format
image-segments has not been worked on yet.  Also, I'm now thinking I
need to do more research into bytecodes and dynamic compilation.  The
bytecodes I have chosen are a mix of high level (sends) and low-level
(direct field access of any object, not just the receiver).  I did this
to support fast closures, but now I'm thinking it would be better to
keep all the bytecodes high level and rely on dynamic compilation (like
Self does).  So, like others have said before, VI4 is a research project
and probably should not be made standard, yet.  I'm finally listening.

I started working on porting closures to the standard image.  Hopefully,
I'll have it ready for you guys next week.

Cheers,
Anthony



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