Re: Stacks, registers, and bytecode. (Oh, my!)

[Larry Wall]

Dan Sugalski writes:
: Right, but in this case we have the advantage of tailoring the instruction 
: set to the language, and given the overhead inherent in op dispatch we also 
: have an incentive to hoist opcodes up to as high a level as we can manage.

We basically tried this experiment with Perl 5, and it's only a partial
success.  Yes, you end up with a Perl VM that can run Perl pretty fast,
but it tends to complicate the mapping to other virtual machines.
(Enough so that we still don't have a reasonable way to run Perl on a
JVM, despite several attempts.)

I guess the real question is to what extent the world of the future will
use interpreters, and to what extent it'll settle on JIT compiling instead.
And that's a big enough dog that we can't wag it very easily.

By the way, have you folks considered how to unify the regex opcodes
with the normal Perl opcodes?  I suspect we might want to do that.

Larry