[PEAK] Fwd: Adding C generation to bytecode assembler

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 04:32 PM 8/20/2006 -0700, Michel Pelletier wrote:
>The idea I am working on is definitely controvertial, mostly because so 
>many others are actively working on these ideas in other, much larger 
>projects, and I'm hesitant to bring it up in public without further proof 
>of concept, but since I've now based my code on peak.util.assembler I 
>think it's at least worth putting forth for discussion if at least to find 
>out if Phillip has essentially written its equivalent this morning before 
>he ate breakast and is about to beat me to the punch, if he hasn't already. ;)

Nope, sorry.  :)


>My initial crude benchmark results are good, simple loops with math ops 
>have a 2x increase in speed, with nested loops gaining even more.  This is 
>without any stack movement reduction yet, so once I implement that I think 
>the performance will jump even more.

I'm impressed, but also very surprised.  I'd really like to see what it is 
that you're doing, because given the goals and steps that you laid out, I 
wouldn't have expected such a big improvement in performance without at 
least some inlining or type inference.  In fact, I'm impressed that you got 
any improvements at all; the C interpreter has previously been shown not to 
really *have* that much overhead.  If you're doing this while generating 
reasonably readable C code (i.e. at least as good as Pyrex's) then I'm in 
absolute awe.