Feb. 25, 2003
11:50 p.m.
Christian Tismer wrote:
Where you really can save some time is to shortcut some of the very short opcodes to not jump back to the ticker counting code, but into a shorter circle.
2.2 -> 2.3 includes this optimization for some opcodes.
Not trying to demoralize you completely, but there are limits about what can be gathered by optimizing the interpreter loop. There was once the p2c project, which gave an overall improvement of 25-40 percent, by totally removing the interpreter loop.
Yes, but p2c was probably not nice to the icache. I doubt 25-40% is an upper bound. Memory bandwidth really sucks now (relatively speaking). I think reference counting is now starting to look like a smart design (in terms of performance). :-) Neil