While sitting on IRC with Dan and Jonathan discussing how to optimizer a certain construct with how we handle globals/package variables, etc. I came to the conclusion that it would be valuable to not have to fetch each and every global, lexical or package variable by name, individually, but instead fetch them in clusters (4-16 at a time).
We already have register frames which are saved and restored very efficiently.
Two things:
1) Lexicals should be reasonably fast, as they're integer indexable in most cases. (The only time we *need* hashlike access is when we're doing symbolic lookup, which is pretty uncommon. Downright impossible for many languages)
2) I can easily see having something equivalent to the lookback op for register stacks. Won't help for ints and floats, but it'll work fine for PMCs and strings.
--
Dan
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Dan Sugalski even samurai
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