On Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 08:57:43PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Adam Turoff wrote:
> > Dammit, I'm not finding the message in the thread, but someone casually
> > mentioned writing the important bits of parsing Perl in Perl5, generating
> > bytecode, and starting Perl6 by writing the bytecode loader. (Apologies
> > for not finding the attribution. Please stand up and elucidate if
> > you've had this idea as well.)
>
> That would be me. I wasn't necessarily thinking of emitting p6 bytecode,
> though that's certainly possible.
What's wrong with bootstrapping Perl6 with the Perl5 bytecode (or the
most interesting subset of Perl5 bytecode)? That lets Perl6 start out
where the parser is read in as bytecode (or compiled to C from Perl or
bytecode) and modify those bytecodes as the need progresses. Voila.
No bootstrapping problem. (e.g. start writing the Perl6 parser in Perl5).
> > That should also aid in the testing effort.
>
> I hadn't thought about that, but it would. I'm thinking we need to set up
> a bunch of performance benchmarks for p6 development too, though that can
> go in as part of the general QA. (Not much Q there if we run slower...)
This came up before in another thread many moons ago (don't have
time to find the reference). IIRC, this was deemed an exercise in
premature optimization (i.e. EVIL!).
Z.
