Animorphic ST (Strongtalk) released!
Tim Rowledge
tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Sun Jul 21 16:42:22 UTC 2002
On Saturday, July 20, 2002, at 02:51 AM, Marcus Denker wrote:
> Tim's approach allows to wait with translation until there is time to
> do it. He suggested to have a single flag in each method, but you could
> actually do more: 1) do profiling to find the hotspots and 2) get some
> typeinformation.
The nice thing about having the compiler in the image is that it is in the
image, which means it is very accessible, improvable, able to make full
use of decent language facilities, reflection etc.
In fact it is my observation that it is always nice to have as much as
possible in the image and as little as possible in the vm. I really
dislike seeing prims that allocate objects (aside from the ones really
needed) since they then tend to get involved in messing with GC policy.
This should be deferred to the image, not messed up in the vm.
As peripherally mentioned before, anothe nice thing about a deferred
translator is that it may very well be able to decide that there is
nothing worth doing for many cases, particularly those involved in image
startup. Doing nothing is often much much quicker than any alternative.
(My favourite TECO instruction, of which I remember nothing but the
comment, said - ' this instruction does nothing, but does it very fast')
tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
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