[virtmach] Virtual Machines and Code Representation

Luk Stoops lstoops@vub.ac.be
Wed, 26 Jul 2000 16:56:14 +0200



Peter William Lount wrote:

> 
> The advantage of the "parse-tree" representation of programs and program
> fragements is that there is more information avaliable about the context
> that the code is in that gets lost with byte codes. Simply put, byte-codes
> lose information. They have enough information to compile to native code,
> but if that extra information was still avalible then it's possible that
> additional optimizations could be applied to the code.
> 
> 
> The pase tree representation is also elegant in that it simplifies the
> number of representations from four (source text, parse tree, byte-codes,
> native code) to three (source text, parse tree and native code). Simple but
> not simplistic is better. Compressed parse-trees offer better space
> efficiency than byte-codes. Smaller sizes means faster loading times.
> 

Do you compare compressed parse-trees against uncompressed byte-codes ?

Otherwise it seems difficult to compress more information into less
space?



greetings

Luk

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[ Luk Stoops                           [lstoops@vub.ac.be]
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