Re: General byte-codes reference

: [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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