integrating the arm bytecode interpreter into IcedTea

[Gary Benson]

Matthias Klose wrote:
> What does it take to integrate the arm bytecode interpreter written
> by Edward into IcedTea? I currently build it as a set of extra
> patches applied to the Ubuntu packaging, which works ok. Ed provided
> another fix to make it work on armv4 as well, so we don't need any
> explicit configuration option anymore (?).

I guess the deal would be to make a patch, and post it to the list for
people to look at.

I do have reservations about this, not about the quality of the code,
but about the motivations behind it and about how well it fits with
Zero.

My main issue is that it's going to be committed into Zero, but it
isn't so much an extension to Zero as a near total replacement of it.
It hooks into the C++ interpreter, but it does so by replacing all of
the C++ interpreter's method entries.  It might be better if it
slotted in as a third interpreter option: template, C++, Ed's.

I can see that being associated with Zero is a good thing in that it
makes Ed's stuff easier to port, but I wonder whether anyone would
ever port it.  Is there a difference in workload between porting Ed's
interpreter and porting the template interpreter?  If you're going to
write each bytecode in assembly then surely it'd make more sense to
port the TI, with 10+ years of optimizations and bugfixes, unless
porting Ed's took significantly less time.

My reservations aside, I can see that Ed's code is useful, and that
people want to use it, so I won't object to it being committed to
IcedTea.

Cheers,
Gary

--
http://gbenson.net/