[virtmach] Re: virtmach-digest V1 #27

jont@us.ibm.com jont@us.ibm.com
Wed, 19 Apr 2000 11:09:45 -0400



Some electronic equipment suggested that David Rush wrote:

> You can also optimize your instruction set by instrumenting your VM in
> various ways to find frequently used instruction sequences.

> For which you then add single instructions. Fix the compiler to emit
> them when appropriate (harder than Huffman-coding the instructions),
> Redo the huffman coding, rinse, repeat until you get to some kind of
> fixed point.

> Then the marketing dweebs will want it to generate JIT native code ;)

>From which one may suggest that the way to do it is to assume that this
will happen, and to skip the interpreter altogether and use an
IR suited to code generation (cf UCI's Oberon "Slim Binaries").
But it may make building a portable debugger harder.

As a short term postition the IR can be used to generate byte code for
an interpreter ...

- JonT

---
Jon Tidswell
Advanced OS Technology Group / Sawmill Linux Project
IBM TJ Watson Research Center 30 Saw Mill River Road, Hawthorne, N.Y. 10532

Email: jont@us.ibm.com   Voice: +1 914 784 7550