[snip]
Although it might be nice if IMC were binary at this stage (for some feel-good-reason?).
You mean, that a HL like perl6 should produce a binary equivalent to ther current .imc file? Yep - this was discussed already, albeit there was no discussion, how this should look like. And the lexer in imcc is pretty fast.
... The current bytecode from parrot already has potential for slowing things down, and that's what worries me here.
I don't see that.
3. He can hand out a platform specific .jit (which would require the target to be able to run it.)
I suspect most end users would be able to use #1 or #2. However for use on embedded systems where size is an issue, having #3 an option would be useful, as I suspect it would shrink the footprint of parrot somewhat.
The JIT-PBC for #3 has a somewhat larger size then plain PBC due to register load/store ops and an additional CFG/register usage PBC section. But running it does require less memory, because the JIT optimizer doesn't have to create all the internal bookkeeping tables.
Cheers, Phil
leo
