Hi All,

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 6:01 AM, Thierry Goubier <thierry.goubier@gmail.com> wrote:

I would not suggest replacing C by LLVM-IR for VM work, in part because LLVM-IR is not what I would call a readable source code format... But I do know that even when doing C to C rewritting for embedded compilation, there is some low-level code that you can't write in C.

I find this whole discussion depressing. ��It seems people would rather put their energy in chasing quick fixes or other technologies instead of contributing to the work that is being done in the existing VM. ��People discuss using LLVM as if the code generation capabilities inside Cog were somehow poor or have no chance of competing. ��Spur is around twice as fast as the current memory manager, has much better support for the FFI. ��Cl��ment and I, now with help from Ronie, are making excellent progress towards an adaptive optimizer/speculative inliner that will give us similar performance to V8 (the Google JavaScript VM, lead by Lars Bak, who implemented the HotSpot VM (Smalltalk and Java)) et al. ��We are trying to get person-power for a high-quality FFI and have a prototype for a non-blocking VM. ��When we succeed C won't be any better and so it won't be an interesting target. ��One will be able to program entirely in Smalltalk and get excellent performance. ��But we need effort. ��Collaboration.