Henrik,

Do I dare to mention that one of the 'gnuify' hacks Ian provided replaces
the interpreter switch with a threaded dispatch?! ;-) Those folks running on
Unix should have a look at sqGnu.h + gnu-interp.c to see what's actually
getting compiled.

  - Andreas

PS. Oh and that was one of the reasons for me to switch to gcc.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Henrik Gedenryd [mailto:Henrik.Gedenryd at lucs.lu.se]
> Sent: Friday, August 11, 2000 1:01 AM
> To: Squeak list
> Cc: recipient list not shown
> Subject: Interpreter speedup possible?
> 
> 
> The following described the Dolphin interpreter:
> 
> > Another of our most dramatic performance improvements was 
> achieved by
> > dispatching independently from each instruction rather than 
> from a main
> > interpreter loop (threaded dispatch). This actually has 
> very little effect
> > on the code size, as at most four instructions are required. The
> > implementation of many bytecodes is very short, and the dispatch
> > instructions can often be intermixed with the bytecode¹s 
> instructions in
> > such a way that the overhead is reduced to the cost of the jump.
> 
> Could this have any significant impact on Squeak? It would 
> seem relatively
> easy to trick this with the Slang inliner.
> 
> (from http://www.object-arts.com/Papers/oopsla99vm.PDF)
> 
> Henrik
> 
>