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What you're talking about -- writing an interpreter that's optimized into a compiler -- is actually coming in the soon-to-be-released Java 9. Check out Graal a
by dgreensp 9y ago
What you're talking about -- writing an interpreter that's optimized into a compiler -- is actually coming in the soon-to-be-released Java 9. Check out Graal and Truffle. I'm pretty excited to play with it at some point.
Prepack reminds me more of a "supercompiler," because it focuses on partial evaluation rather than optimization.
- ianbicking 9y agoYour "supercompiler" phrase made me think about what happens if you start applying the partial evaluation over and over. Of course nothing happens... unless you know something more than what you knew before. Which you might! That in turn made me think of the Wolfram Language, which feels like this to me – you declare things, and as the set of declarations continues the language starts to "know" more things, and your statements become more concrete. This is interesting because it's all automated, you can undo things, change them, implicitly loop them by considering multiple possibilities. I'm not sure you could take Prepack and do this. But it sure seems interesting. A kind of partial evaluation coding notebook... not so unlike a symbolic spreadsheet I suppose.