On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 3:17 PM, David Griswold <david.griswold.256 at gmail.com
> wrote:

>
> Yes, it's becoming clear that V8 doesn't do anything that radically new or
> magical, and that it was specifically designed for JavaScript, not as any
> kind of universal dynamic language VM.  I'm especially disappointed at
> Eliot's observation that it doesn't have a bytecode intermediate form,
> although they may do mixed-mode execution by first interpreting the AST.
>

Why is that a bad thing?  I actually thought that was one of the most
interesting aspects.  Bytecodes can provide you a concise portable format,
but you could also do that by compressing or otherwise condensing source
code (which I guess one way of condensing is to map to bytecode).  I'm not
saying bytecodes wouldn't be desirable, but there's something appealing (to
me) about a direct translation from source to machine code and I'm curious
what other advantages bytecodes might have.

Also, in a really pure OO VM and language, what would the bytecode set
reduce to?  Three instructions?  push, pop and send?

- Stephen
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