current vm plan

[Andy Wingo]

Hi,

Running the test suite on my laptop on the vm branch, without futzing
with power management foo, takes 14 seconds. Removing all of the .go
files and running the test suite takes 10 seconds. This is not good!

I profiled and it turns out that most of the time is spent in GC,
presumably not reaping very much. So the GC is slow, we know that. But
that's not my problem, I don't think: the vm branch should interact
*very* little with the GC. "mmap and go" should be the mantra, regarding
startup.

So my current plan is to figure out how the various allocations can
avoid malloc() and avoid the GC in general: static strings and symbols,
programs as double-words but not smobs with allocated data structures,
directly encoding the program structure as objcode on disk, etc.

The goal is to produce something as efficient as razor:

  http://wiki.github.com/krh/razor/razor-design

But in objcode. I'm willing to produce endian-dependent objcode to do
that.

Anyway, that's the plan. Hopefully I'll have some results in some days
or at least by the beginning of February.

Cheers,

Andy
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