Re: guile-vm 0.3

[Rob Browning]

Keisuke Nishida <address@hidden> writes:

> My VM lacks a JIT compiler; it's just a simple bytecode interpreter.
> If you want a JIT or a real compiler, you could convert the
> intermediate form (GLIL) of my compiler into machine code, using
> Marius's Lightning module.  My work will put more emphasis on the
> higher layer of the compiler, including a module system, a type
> system, and optimization.

And I think there's also the possibility that a hybrid, combining JIT
and byte-code might be a really interesting approach.  For some parts
of your code, the memory compression of bytecoding might be a big win,
and for the tightest inner loops, you might want Lightning.

I wonder if you could hook up the system with a profiler so that
during development guile could identify the critical sections and try
each approach, eventually choosing the one that's fastest.  Then you
might need a way to annotate your code so that when you load normally,
guile will choose the right one by default.

Another interesting possibility would be a run-time profiler that
compiled a cached subset of the most frequently called functions --
this might be good for a guile webserver or database that computed in
"phases".

-- 
Rob Browning <address@hidden> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930