Re: master 289000e: Merge branch 'feature/native-comp' into trunk

[Óscar Fuentes]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

> OK, I see what you mean, now.  Currently, if I understand correctly,
> regexps are compiled into an interpreted language at runtime, and they
> are stored in a (fairly large) cache indexed by the regexp string.
>
> When would you compile the regexps into native code?  For constant
> regexps this can be done at build time, but there are regexps
> constructed at run time in Emacs.  This compilation of regexps at run
> time might negate the advantages in speed that the complation would
> otherwise bring.

On simple strategy is to compile the regexps by explicit request of the
code author, he decides when a regexp is worth the extra work of turning
it into native code. As per the regexps built at run time, an ordinary
JIT compiler would have no problem with them at all, but Emacs JIT
engine puts the code it generates into shared libraries. I don't know if
it also supports generating and using code directly in memory.