Re: Supercompiled Perl

On Fri, May 25, 2001 at 10:25:43AM -0500, Jordan Dimov wrote:
>   Is anyone here familiar with the concept of supercompilation, as
> described by prof. Valentin Turchin in [1] for example?  
>   [1] ``The Concept of a Supercompiler'', Valenting F. Turchin, ACM Trans.
> Program. Lang. Syst. 8, 3 (Jul 1986), pp. 292-325

I've read this. It's waffle. To put it into human-readable terms, it's a
question of examining the possible values of variables through a program
and massaging the code path, back-propagating your results. This isn't
anything new, since most compilers do this anyway. Especially since the
Dragon book was extolling this kind of optimization in 1986.

>   Is Perl suitable for this kind of program transformation? 

Of course. Check out the B module.

> Turchin has founded a start up (www.supercompilers.com) with the purpose of
> developing a supercompiler for Java, speeding up Java code by a factor of
> 100.  

Can't get much slower, can it?

-- 
The course of true anything never does run smooth.
		-- Samuel Butler