From: Rik Hemsley <rik@...>
Date: 2002-04-04T13:48:34+09:00
Subject: Re: About efficiency

#if Sean Middleditch

> > > > Ruby VM is planned.
> > >
> > > VM's make things a *lot* faster.  I'm experimenting with Scriptix, and
> > > taking it from the Ruby-ish nodes to a byte-code language improved the
> > > speed by 1.5-3 times, depending on the test (I'm no profressional
> > > benchmark writer, mind you).
> >
> > Can you (or anybody else) explain why that is so?  It's not obvious to
> > me where any significant savings could accrue, except possibly from
> > avoiding allocating lots of syntax tree nodes during the compile
> > phase.
>
> Well, that is a huge source of savings.  I cut the run time of smaller
> scripts in half just with some compiler optimizations.  Yes, the savings
> don't matter much for large applications, but a lot of people write
> smaller scripts.

This advantage could be emulated using 'smart' block-allocation - but the 
other two speedups sound nice, coupled with the option of adding a JIT 
compiler.

Rik