Re: librep's indirect threaded bytecode interpretter

[karlheg at bittersweet dot inetarena dot com (Karl M. Hegbloom)]

>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Livshin <mlivshin@bigfoot.com> writes:

    Michael> karlheg@bittersweet.inetarena.com (Karl M. Hegbloom) writes:
    >> Any chance that a similar byte code machine for Guile will ever be
    >> implemented?  I would really like Guile to be that quick.

    Michael> would you like to volunteer?  the only chance for something to be done 
    Michael> is somebody willing to do it.

 That's a long way off, I'm afraid.  I do not have the skills it would
 require at this point in time.  I don't fully understand Guile yet.
 After a several months break from it, I'm back to my Lisp/Scheme
 studies again...  I'm reviewing right now, and soon will be moving
 forward again with "Structure and Interpretation of Computer
 Programs", "Lisp in Small Peices" and "Essentials of Computer
 Languages" (MIT), amoung others.  There's quite a lot left for me to
 learn.

    >> They also have a module system that is probably worth having a look
    >> at.

    Michael> it looks very much like the Scheme48 one, doesn't it?

 That's what it says.  I don't know how it works yet.  I'm a newbie.

>>>>> "John" == John Harper <john@dcs.warwick.ac.uk> wrote:

    Karl> I mentioned Rep on the Guile mailing list, and was told that Guile's
    Karl> tree code interpretter should be faster than any byte code engine
    Karl> there is.  Ha!  If they want to keep up, they'll need to implement a
    Karl> threaded byte code machine also.  It's a pretty neat trick, I'd say.

    John> I agree, but thank Ceri Storey, who found the idea and did the
    John> preliminary implementation :-)

    John> actually, IIRC using the threaded interpreter only gets about a 10%
    John> performance increase, there were some other optimizations as well

    John> (and a 10% slowdown due to the module system; but it's well worth it!)