Re: incremental compilation

[vme131!lsiserv1!jecel@uunet.UU.NET (Jecel Mattos Assumpcao Jr)]

>But none of this is running yet, so I won't speculate any further...
>I better spend my time implementing it.  The paper will be available
>through ftp in July.

Well, I will just have to wait 'till July!

The reason I started thinking about multiple compilers is that I am looking
at the inmos Transputer and how to implement Self ( or as close as I can
get to Self ) on it. Seeing how closely the transputer's machine language
resembles the bytecodes, I want to see if I can skip the bytecode phase and
generate bytecode-like transputer code as a first step. That would run very
slowly, but if a better compiler ( optimizer ? ) would rewrite the most
frequently called methods we should have a reasonable performance.

I see that a whole series of compilers might be useful, but you would have
to gather some statistics to decide when, and what methods, to recompile.

I hadn't thought of background compilation, but it is a fantastic idea! That
would go a long way towards making the system more responsive in interactive
applications.

- Jecel