Re: wip-rtl, solstice edition

[Noah Lavine]

Hello,

> Seriously though, that seems like a good plan.  I wonder what Noah’s
> attempts at JITing the 2.0 bytecode would have achieved, though, if we
> think of both JIT and the new VM as an “interim solution” before AOT
> native compilation.

I can't remember the last email I sent about that, but I think I might
have dropped the ball here, so let me say what the current status of
the project was. The JIT compiler worked fine. You could JIT-compile a
function and have Guile automatically run the JITted code. The real
problem was writing the JIT compiler - the one I had only supported
four instructions, because I just wanted to prove I could integrate it
with the rest of Guile.

I sent another email recently about different ways to make the JITter
understand all of the bytecode, but at the time, I thought I would
have to parse the C definition of the VM and generate the JITter from
that in order for it to be merged into Guile. I never got over that
hurdle. If we are willing to generate both the VM and the JITter from
another source, it's possible that I could revive my old JIT branch.

However, I'm still not sure if that's the best way there. Having the
assembler written in Scheme gives you an easier path towards
all-Scheme native compilation, which you'd probably want for an AOT
compiler.

Noah