On Apr 29, 5:36 pm, Jochen Theodorou <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I wanted to collect a bit data to how you avoid boxing in your language
> implementations. I am asking because currently Groovy makes lots of
> calls via Reflection, and that means creating for each call an Object[],
> containing boxed values of ints and all the other primitive types. Not
> only that... for doing 2+3, we actually box the numbers, make a dynamic
> method call to Integer.plus, which then unboxes the values, makes the
> plus operation and boxes the result. Usually we keep the boxed value, so
> there is no need to unbox again, but still... for a simple plus you need
> to do quite a lot. And even if the call would be native.. I make
> measurements, that such code is 20-30 times slower, even with a direct
> method call.
>
> The best thing would be of course to call the method with primitive
> types.. but keeping such a type information isn't the most easy thing to
> do. Reflective method calls do not return primitives and f(a)+g(b) might
> or might not be something where two ints are added. On the other hand...
> keeping the values on the stack isn't easy either. There are just too
> many primitive types to provide a path for each and every primitive
> type. Also longs and doubles take up two slots instead of one, making
> stack manipulation more difficult.
>
> I see here an advantage for interpreted languages, since thy have not to
> care about such things and can do whatever they need to do. And static
> languages do usually now the resulting types of method calls, so they
> won't have these problems either I guess..
>
> John Rose was talking about tuples... but I am not sure they can be used
> to resolve the general problem. What do others think?
>
I think the answer is tags, as John Rose discussed here:
http://blogs.sun.com/jrose/entry/fixnums_in_the_vm
That, standard fast multiprecision arithmetic, and tail call
optimization are the wish list for me.
Rich
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