Re: General byte-codes reference

Trent Waddington <s337240@student.uq.edu.au>
8 Dec 2000 22:22:21 -0500

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Related articles
General byte-codes reference mak@imakhno.freeserve.co.uk (Makhno) (2000-12-07)
Re: General byte-codes reference s337240@student.uq.edu.au (Trent Waddington) (2000-12-08)
Re: General byte-codes reference evilzr@yahoo.com (Daniel Dunbar) (2000-12-08)
Re: General byte-codes reference anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (2000-12-11)
Re: General byte-codes reference midkiff@watson.ibm.com (2000-12-11)
Re: General byte-codes reference Norman_member@newsguy.com (Norman Culver) (2000-12-18)
Re: General byte-codes reference brangdon@cix.compulink.co.uk (2000-12-18)
Re: General byte-codes reference patc@acm.org (Pat Caudill) (2000-12-18)
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From: Trent Waddington <s337240@student.uq.edu.au>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 8 Dec 2000 22:22:21 -0500
Organization: University of Queensland
References: 00-12-030
Keywords: interpreter, comment
Posted-Date: 08 Dec 2000 22:22:21 EST

: [There's lots of folklore, dunno of any papers. All else being equal,
: the fewer trips you make through your interpreter loop, the faster your
: program will run so you want to minimize operations, not necessarily
: bytes. Bytecode interpreters are more like CISC than RISC machines.
: -John]


is this necessarily true? If your bytecode is 5 times more "compact" than
equivilent native machine code and you have an overhead of 200% to
translate the bytecode to machine code that runs at 50% of natively
compiled machine code then which is faster, native machine code or
bytecode? If the runtime of the program is less than the harddrive seek +
retreive time of the native code, isn't the bytecode faster?
[The overhead is typically more like 10:1. On systems like Matlab where
each operator does a great deal of work, e.g., extract eigenvalues, the
space savings could plausibly win due to less paging. -John]


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