[antlr-interest] (Slightly OT) Of interest to Interpreter writers

Andy Tripp antlr at jazillian.com
Tue Jun 3 10:06:09 PDT 2008


Ian Kaplan wrote:

>   Perhaps I'm being unfair since I am not familiar with the execution 
> constraints for JavaScript.  But generating simple, unoptimized, byte 
> code should not be much slower than generating the syntax tree and, as 
> the authors not, produce faster execution.

I think you're being perfectly fair. Though the article says
"SquirrelFish owes a lot of its design to some of the latest 
research in the field of efficient virtual machines", they really do seem
to have just figured out that compiled bytecode runs faster than interpreted
source code. Maybe it's the "lazy" runtime compilation that they feel is
leading edge, as that's only been mainstream for a decade or so.

It looks like very nice work, it's just that I don't think it's as new
an innovative as it sounds. I guess nothing is.


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