On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Damien Neil wrote:
> Proposed: Parrot should never crash due to malformed bytecode. When
> choosing between execution speed and bytecode safety, safety should
> always win.
I don't see this as a safety issue. There's nothing unsafe about
crashing. It's just not as pretty as putting up a big ol' "YOUR BYTECODE
IS SNOOKERED" message. Having that message is not worth even a 1%
degradation in runtime speed.
> Careful op design and possibly a validation pass before
> execution will hopefully keep the speed penalty to a minimum.
Sounds great, but make it a separate program that gets run optionally with
the default being to not run it. Validating variable-length instructions
takes non-trival time and having it outside the normal execution path will
allow to indulge in whatever costly-code analysis you desire.
-sam
