language interpreters/ interpreted languages weaknesses?

[Neel Krishnaswami]

On Fri, 03 Sep 1999 13:45:22 GMT, Blake Winton <bwinton at tor.dhs.org> wrote:
>
>And is it Self which compiles some stuff to machine code, and then every
>now and then uncompiles it and uses the source, sometimes recompiling it
>again?  It sounded like a weird idea when I first read about it, but the
>more I thought about it, the weirder it got.

Yes. The idea is to profile the program while it runs and use that
information to optimize the program on the fly.  I think that maybe
some Smalltalk environments might also use variants of this idea.

Craig Chamber's Vortex compiler for Cecil uses a somewhat more static
version of this idea: you run your program with profiling turned on,
and then can feed the profile information to the compiler which will
recompile a more efficient version of the program.

It's all very neat. 


Neel