DeRobertis : The JITC is now officialy time tested.
Alain : I am glad to see that things progressed during my "absence".
DeRobertis : And quite frankly, without say another 4 months of work,
it's not going to beat the interpreter (which is already quite fast)
Note only that, it takes six min. to compile the one 7K file which
contains it. Ouch. And it does not even get the right answers.
Alain : Pretty devastating review, eh !
DeRobertis : Due to the vast number of cross-TOC calls, memory
accesses, and instruction-cache reloads, it actually runs slower than
the interpreter. Yes, the cross-TOC calls, memory accesses, and cache
reloads could be eliminated, in which case it would beat the
interpreter.
Alain : There is hope then ?
DeRobertis : And finding the evaluation bug would be nice, too. But
this would require: (1) some serious MacsBug work to find the bug; (2)
a register allocator; (3) a complete analysis of the HT code, keeping
track of variable types & usage; (4) and more.
Alain : I don't presume to understand everything you are saying above,
but I nevertheless appreciate your detailed analysis, and the
consequent presentation of what needs to be done to solve it.
DeRobertis : I think right now we need to get OpenCard off the ground.
Alain : I will do my best to get our collaboration infrastructure off
the ground. None of that work was lost in the incident that partially
wiped me out.
DeRobertis : We don't have 4 months to wait around while I try to get
together a nice compiler.
Alain : We could use the MetaCard engin and/or its compiler, couldn't
we ?
DeRobertis : I'm going back to working on the plain 'ol interpreter,
which still kicks HyperCard's, Surf's, and SuperCard's collective rear
ends. I'm not sure about MC.
Alain : Keep us informed of your progress.
DeRobertis : Besides, the JITC is such a mess that it'd probably get
Uli to hire an assassin for me.
Alain : Messy code is definitely a no-no.
DeRobertis : I'll put it in the archive folder of the next snapshot;
anyone wishing to tinker with it may. There is still quite abit that
could be done for the interpreter, including optimizations which could
probably double its speed in certain cases.
Alain : What "archive" folder do you speak of ?
It's good to be back,
Alain, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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