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> Just In Time compilation was first applied to regexps before anything else. This was done by Ken Thompson. Citation for this? I'd be surprised if Thompson w
by ken 8y ago
> Just In Time compilation was first applied to regexps before anything else. This was done by Ken Thompson.
Citation for this? I'd be surprised if Thompson was first. Runtime optimization was long the domain of Lisp programmers. Blurring the distinction between compile-time and run-time is one of PG's things that "made Lisp different".
https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/11/05/how-to-jit-an-introduction https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/11/05/how-to-jit-an-intro... references a paper by Aycock, which says McCarthy was first, in his original Lisp paper, nearly a decade before Thompson.
- chombier 8y agoI think Rob Pike mentioned it in a recent talk on the history of Unix https://youtu.be/_2NI6t2r_Hs?t=1901 https://youtu.be/_2NI6t2r_Hs?t=1901
- ken 8y agoHe says this is the first case of regular expressions on a computer, which I believe, but I'm not hearing anything about runtime optimization or compilation.
- chombier 8y agoless than one minute later he mentions "compiling on the fly" some assembly code https://youtu.be/_2NI6t2r_Hs?t=1944 https://youtu.be/_2NI6t2r_Hs?t=1944
- ken 8y agoSure, but he never claims that's the first instance of runtime compilation, just that the implementation is "pretty interesting".