[Vm-dev] Push/pop considered harmful

[David T. Lewis]

On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 11:24:07PM -0800, Andreas Raab wrote:
> 
> What we are doing right now is along those lines - basically we are 
> replacing push/pop in the interpreter proxy by variants that don't 
> actually do push and pop. Rather than that, pop is ignored (it only 
> remembers how many times you popped so we can track inconsistencies) and 
> push remembers the return value.

Excellent idea, especially since this can be done without requiring
modifications to the existing plugins.

> This should definitely be replaced at some point by a proper 
> #primitiveReturnValue: call. I was wondering what people think about the 
> possibility of automatically rewriting plugins to fix those uses? It 
> should be reasonably easy to find all the uses of "interpreterProxy pop: 
> foo" and just remove them and replace "interpreterProxy 
> push[Float|Int]:" with "interpreterProxy primitiveReturn[Float|Int]:".

This would be helpful, although not essential. It might have problems
with things like this:
  interpreterProxy pop: 1; push: foo

But if it does 90% of the conversions automatically, that would still be
a big help.

Dave