On 16-May-06, at 12:05 PM, John M McIntosh wrote:
I'll note the cache is very efficient, someone a few years back attempted to make some changes and make the cache much much bigger In testing on various platforms we could not show any improvement in the standard benchmarks to justify the additional memory requirements.
I think it was worse - on several machines of plausible spec it actually got slower.
VisualWorks (and probably other VMs at a guess) got some serious benefits out of polymorphic inline caches. I rather doubt inline caching is going to work in an interpreter but there might be some advantage in making the current global cache polymorphic. It could be a decent experiment to try out as a class exercise for example, since even if it turns out not to be beneficial it would be instructive and require all the usual investigative, analytical and explicative skills. I'd even volunteer to help with reviewing and grading, subject to time constraints.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim World Ends at Ten! Pictures at 11 on Fox News!