On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 06:46:20PM -0500, Ken Fox wrote: > > JITs help when the VM is focused on lots of small instructions > with well-known, static semantics. Perl's use of Parrot is going > to be focused almost completely on PMC vtable ops. A JIT has > no advantage over a threaded interpreter.
Unless we can get Perl to use the other features of Parrot outside the scope of the PMC vtable ops, Parrot won't give you any real benefits other than a clean rewrite of the Perl internals to look more like Ruby :) > About the only place where a JIT might really win big is in > regexps. It would be interesting to see how JIT regexs would compare with something like libpcre (which is pretty damn fast). > Have other people come to the same conclusion? I think there is still a good cause for JIT. > Is there any interest in a less dynamic dialect of Perl that can > take advantage of a JIT? I will admit to probably being one of the worst offenders of the special cases Dan has been mentioning, but I know that most of my code is of the sort that would benefit from JIT. More importantly, I think a lot of the problems currently facing Parrot really doing its job well, is the nasty habits people have relying upon the side effects of perl5 lexical scoping. The same results could be had, but in a different fashion.
