[Vm-dev] Fast named primitives (was: regression: TestObjectsAsMethods crash in 4.19.5 (not in 4.16.7))

[David T. Lewis]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 12:00:04AM +0100, Nicolas Cellier wrote:
>
> On Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 11:17:23AM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
> > 
> > > On 2021-03-20, at 9:01 AM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > That protects it against accidental invocation from the image as more numbered
> > > primitives get added (yuk). I'll give that a try and see how it looks.
> > 
> > I really wish for no numbered primitives at all. I thought I had worked out how once upon a time but not quite.
> > 
>
> just FYI, I had to use a numbered primitive for highBit because to my
> knowledge, named primitives cannot be jitted yet...
> And the main interest for this primitive is to be jitted.
> https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/issues/418
>

I wonder if there might be a solution that meets both goals:

  1) From the image, I want to call named primitives

  2) In the VM, I need the primitives to be numbered for fast JIT

Is there some way that a table of primitive numbers could be created
at runtime to support the JIT without requiring a declarative table
of primitive numbers at VM compile time?

Dave