[Vm-dev] VM Maker: VMMaker-dtl.222.mcz

[Levente Uzonyi]

On Sat, 19 Mar 2011, Eliot Miranda wrote:

> I think we urgently need to merge.  I haven't looked yet but has 
> Interpreter been refactored out from under ObjectMemory?  If it hasn't

Not yet.

> would you be happy for
> me to do that?  Things that I think need to be done to Interpreter are
> 
> a) refactor it out from under ObjectMemory and under 
> InterpreterPrimitives
> b) use NewObjectMemory (it's a tad faster)
> c) throw away four of the method cache fields used only by Jitter, which 
> de facto is now obsolete, and use the StackInterpreter's folding of 
> primitiveIndex and
> primitiveFunction (it's a tad faster)
> d) also use platform-order floats (it's a tad faster)
> 
> What is useful about Interpreter is
> a) it doesn't need a threaded or interrupt-driven heartbeat so it is 
> simpler to port to bare metal
> b) it uses contexts and lacks all the complexity of context-to-stack 
> mapping and so for many VM experiments it is significantly simpler to 
> understand and
> extend, and for certain context-intensive computations it may be faster
> 
> So for me its worth keeping all these VMs, but the merge task is tedious 
> and expensive so I would like there to be only one main line.
> 
> are we, the VM devs (Ian, Andreas, David, Igor, Myself, others?) in 
> agreement?

I'm not really a VM dev, but I agree. :)


Levente

> 
> best,
> Eliot