Re: data-crunching in guile

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi,

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:

> What I'm getting at is that I think we should have VM ops for working on
> vectors -- both generic vectors, and specific ops for bytevectors, and
> probably an op for string-ref as well, and possibly string-set!. Then a
> native code backend could be effectively implemented to operate on the
> GLIL or assembly level, relying on the Tree-IL compiler's previous
> resolution of high-level operations (i.e., vector-set!) to low-level
> instructions. I think we have the space in the VM, and if we group all
> of the vector instructions at the end, we shouldn't affect the
> instruction cache too much.

Why not, but...

It looks to me like a failure to optimize the general case, which we
work around by specializing the instruction set.

Maybe we could have a more generic approach to the problem.  For
instance, there could be a way to annotate primitive procedures with
information useful to the compiler, such as "returns-single-value",
"return-value-unspecified", etc., which would allow the generated code
to take shortcuts.  But maybe this is just unrealistic.  What do you
think?

Thanks,
Ludo'.