"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Writing Run-time Optimizers in High Level Languages

Miguel de Icaza is crazy about this...

One of the fascinating things about Jikes's JIT engine is that it was completely written in Java. Absolutely mind-blowing. The upside is that many things can now be done in a higher-level language than C like JITing and garbage collection, the downside is that these systems are fairly heavy during compilation time and are best suited for server use and not desktop use.

And I am crazy about the following, and wonder how they compare...

This talk summarises two decades of work on Smalltalk and Self compilation and virtual machine technology and describes a novel attempt at an adaptive optimizer for Smalltalk that is written in Smalltalk and to a meaningful extent, portable across implementations... the explicit representation of code and execution state make it convenient to implement a hybrid architecture where an adaptive optimizer written entirely in Smalltalk, guided by type information obtained from the VM, produces optimized bytecoded methods that are executed by a more-or-less conventional VM.

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About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.