On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 08:18:04PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> That'd be interesting. Try cobbling up a version of the assembler that does
> big-endian assembly and a loader that reads and byteswaps, and see what you
> get for start-to-finish performance.
I'm going to take a crack at that Real Soon Now. I'm betting that
the penalty is a) overwhelmed by I/O and syscall overhead to load
the bytecode in the first place, and b) very small compared to the
execution time of the bytecode.
> Don't forget that this also kills mmap and the potential to share one copy
> of the code across multiple simultaneous invocations of Parrot.
Yes. On the other hand, I'm not certain how much of a win mmaping
bytecode will really give us in the long run. It depends on how
large bytecode files are, and what manner of fixups will be needed
on it. (If most bytecode pages are touched during the fixup pass,
mmap isn't a win at all.)
- Damien
