From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2003-07-30T12:18:58+09:00
Subject: Ruby => Rite, AST => Bytecode?

Matz and fellow Rubyists,

On pragprog, we're sort-of discussing the creation of a new language
("Pragmatic") as an exercise in extending one's programming
experience. Now, there's a lot of discussion on the low-end, but the
most interesting to me was this, and I was wondering if something
like the idea behind Juice might be a good thing for Rite, rather
than a "pure" bytecode setup.

What do you think?

-austin

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 11:57:26 +1000, Sumskas, Peter (Peter) wrote:
[...]
> The idea behind Juice was to encode a portable encoding of the
> program not as bytecode (which is the usual way to do things) but
> to encode the AST as the portable format. This lead to several
> interesting features for Juice:
> 
> * the binaries were actually smaller than the equivalent bytecodes
>   and smaller by far that machine-specific binaries.
> * the binaries contained far more information about program
>   structure than the equivalent bytecodes did. This led to being
>   able to take better advantage of the target platform. A JIT
>   compiler would translate the AST into the backend representation
>   and it had a much easier time of optimizing the code than an
>   equivalent JIT compiler for a bytecode system would have. I saw
>   this demonstrated in '97 or '98. Given that Juice had less
>   resources than Java devoted to it you can imagine how impressive
>   it was to see a recoding of some Java applets executing
>   approximately five times as fast as the original Java did (I
>   realize this is highly subjective but the implication is that
>   wherever the limitation was with Java they had taken the wrong
>   approach to portability and performance).
> * due to the small size of the binaries it was faster, on networks
>   and PCs of the day, to download a Juice applet and JIT-compile
>   them on the target machine than it was to download the
>   equivalent platform-specific binary and execute it.
[...]

--
austin ziegler    * austin@halostatue.ca * Toronto, ON, Canada
software designer * pragmatic programmer * 2003.07.29
                                         * 23.18.28