Re: proposal: a specialized VM for numeric computation, called as a Lua library

[KHMan <keinhong@...>]

David Manura wrote:
> [snip] 
> Here, "compile" would convert the given Lua-like code snippet to a
> function object, under the assumption that all variables in the
> snippet are local and of type number.  These restrictions are made so
> that the code can be compiled to a more specialized bytecode format
> and interpreted under a specialized VM optimized for numeric code.

I doubt you'd get much of a speedup using interpretation. Too much 
overhead. What kind of interpreted virtual instructions do you 
have in mind that would be worth the effort to implement?

> The language recognized by "compile" might also include extensions to
> the Lua language, such as intrinsic operators like trigonometric and
> bitwise, as you would see in a CPU and FPU. [snip] SSE-like ops may be added as well,
> which can give some speedups even in ANSI C [3].

But in order to compile really efficiently, add all the hinting 
and change all the normal rules and you'd end up with something 
rather different from standard Lua -- a "Dr Jekyll" Lua and a "Mr 
Hyde" Lua and you'd need another task switch for your programming 
brain.

Is it worth the effort? I don't think it's going to win many 
benchmarks. I don't see a clear 'win' here... anything that ends 
up running native code will still be much faster.

--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia