I doubt this is what you're thinking -- not sure I read this clearly -- but I caught an interview with John McCarthy on the 'tubes wherein he seemed to indicate that he was interested in a universal intermediate representation.
I thought the idea was cool. On Jul 26, 2011, at 6:43 AM, John Nilsson <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 8:16 AM, BGB <[email protected]> wrote: > the main merit of a bytecode format is that it could shorten the path in > getting to native code, potentially allowing it to be faster. > > It seems to me that there is a lot of derivation of information going on when > interpreting source code. First a one dimensional stream of characters is > transformed into some kind of structured representation, possibly in several > steps. From the structural representation a lot of inference about the > program happens to deduce types and other properties of the structure. Once > inside a VM even more information is gathered such as determining if call > sites are typically monomorphic or not, and so on. > > In other words a _lot_ of CPU cycles are spend on deriving the same > information, again and again, each time a program is loaded. Not only is this > a waste of energy it also means that each interpreter of the program needs to > be able to derive all this information on their own, which leads to very > complex programs (expensive to develop). > > Would it not be a big improvement if we could move from representing programs > as text-strings into representing them in some format capable of representing > all this derived information? Does any one know of attempts in this direction? > > BR, > John > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
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