[Vm-dev] Thoughts about Cog and "tracing" etc

[Göran Krampe]

Hi folks!

This post is a just a "heads up" based on some websurfing around VMs and 
JITs. I am itching badly to hear Eliot announce some kind of Cog-thingy 
- so consider this rambling post to be a symptom of that itch. :)

There are a few things going on in the VM world that most of us have no 
clues about. We know about V8 but most may not know about 
TraceMonkey/Tamarin and its use of a new technique called "tracing" and 
a backing library for it - nanojit.

Evidently TraceMonkey is giving V8 a real run for its money, and AFAICT 
this is mainly due to work of Andreas Gal (really interesting long article):

	http://andreasgal.com/2008/08/22/tracing-the-web

And some other:

	http://www.bailopan.net/blog/?p=72

Hot off the press (yesterday):

	http://www.bailopan.net/blog/?p=430

After having read that Eliot does not think LLVM is suitable mainly due 
to lack of large basic blocks in Smalltalk code - and he seems to be 
looking hard at Factor and its JIT - I just wanted to mention the above 
as Yet Another Interesting Bit. I also think that the latest work on Lua 
(LuaJIT) includes tracing, not sure though.

So Eliot, how is your work progressing? No pressure, just LOTS of 
interest! :)

regards, Göran

PS. Being bored hacking C#...