At 01:07 AM 12/18/2002 +0900, Dan wrote:

>None of those, actually. If I was going to look for the speedups I was 
>talking about, I'd compile straight to executable code, with a heck of an 
>optimizer in the middle. It requires good flow checking to determine 
>implied types where possible, and on-the-fly code generation and 
>regeneration (and recompilation) based on the likely case in the source 
>and the changes in the source as methods get redefined. It's a really cool 
>segment of computer research, but it's not an easy segment.

And with dynamic typing and late binding it gets very non-trivial.
Got it.

On the general topic, Dan, when do you decide that doing this optimisation
is a better solution than, say, moving to a Septium 5.0 with 1Tb of memory?

Given the large installed based of Perl, I can see that such an effort would
have an immediate pay-off.  With Ruby, I am not so sure.  Perhaps, as others
have suggested, application level optimisations are the way to go...

Of course, there is the fun of the challenge ... ;-)

-mark.