The article stresses how their JIT is much more lightweight than GCC/LLVM, which is perfectly valid, but why not compare MIR against the other portable lightwei

The article stresses how their JIT is much more lightweight than GCC/LLVM, which is perfectly valid, but why not compare MIR against the other portable lightweight JIT engines out there? They're not the first to think of it. The article mentions Cranelift, but that's a 'middleweight JIT' with a proper SSA IR. I was surprised to see LibJIT has more LOC than Cranelift - I thought it was lighter. (Imperfect proxy for runtime 'weight', of course.) If you want a lightweight portable JIT engine, there's already GNU Lightning [0], and the atrociously-named Lightening fork [1] (used in the new JIT in the GNU Guile Scheme interpreter, which turned up on the HN front page recently). Here's a 1996 paper (preprint) on a research JIT named VCODE which executed around 8 instructions to generate each instruction in its output. [2] (Sadly it was never released, as far as I can tell, and is presumably long dead.) Anyway, with all that said, I wish this project well. No-one's managed to get good performance out of Ruby yet, so it's certainly ambitious. Google gave up on Unladen Swallow, and that was a JIT for Python, which, as I understand it, is more amenable to JIT than Ruby. Even failing that, having a quality rival to GNU Lightning would be worthwhile. [0] https://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/ https://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/ [1] https://www.wingolog.org/archives/2019/05/24/lightening-run-time-code-generation https://www.wingolog.org/archives/2019/05/24/lightening-run-... [2] http://www-leland.stanford.edu/class/cs343/resources/vcode-annotated.pdf http://www-leland.stanford.edu/class/cs343/resources/vcode-a...