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000034_icon-group-sender_Tue Sep 17 08:33:24 2002.msg
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by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.11.1/8.11.1) id g8HFXAk06288
for icon-group-addresses; Tue, 17 Sep 2002 08:33:10 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200209171533.g8HFXAk06288@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org>
X-Newsgroups: comp.lang.icon
Subject: Re: Icon Wish 2
Date: 17 Sep 2002 14:42:23 GMT
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To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
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Status: RO
The world rejoiced as TrolletAtskynetDOTbe <complaint@nospam.org> wrote:
> Christopher Browne wrote:
>> There seem to be two other implementations of the ".NET VM," which
>> /could/ be a counterargument. But I doubt they will be /realistic/
>> alternatives to .NET anymore than the "UNIX port" of DCOM made it
>> realistic to deploy COM-based applications on UNIX.
>
> I put a :-) after my question 'What is .NET' - but I was serious when I
> wrote it.
> Let me think .. when did I first hear of it? Two years back?
> When did I last hear of it? Two years back.
> So it has become an integral part of Windows development after all?
> As long as it doesn't infect non-Windows areas, I guess that is OK.
I'm not sure it's "integral" yet. (I suspect it has too many
discontinuities to be piece-wise continuous, and thus integrable...
:-))
> Everybody seemed to agree that a framework like .NET was a Good Thing
> (tm) but they also suspected that Microsoft would certainly find a way
> to take a Good Thing and do something bad with it ... so they did, it
> seems.
> Two years back, I wanted to find out what it was ... now I am more
> relaxed about it.
There still seems to be a lot of "vaporware" about it. Be sure to
realize that it's competition to J2EE, as opposed to other things.
>> It would seem to me to make a /lot/ more sense to try to deploy Icon
>> atop the upcoming Perl "Parrot" bytecode system. Consider that:
>> a) It /is/ intended to be portable;
>> b) There is intent for it to be not /totally/ Perl-oriented, as the
>> Python and Ruby communities have had discussions about cooperation;
>> c) It is not inconceivable that you could submit changes to Parrot to
>> the Perl team, and have /some/ hope of them being accepted.
>
> If Icon can find its way in between Perl and C somewhere ... I guess it
> might benefit from taking advantage of a Perl source-to-bytecode
> compiler/bytecode runtime in one end and icont in the other?
>
> Of course, if a bytecode-to-binary compiler is made, then icont is not
> needed ... and Perl becomes a compiled language, too.
>
> Good idea?
Actually, I don't think so. Generating native code has at least two
demerits here:
a) Compiled code is no longer portable across platforms;
b) Native-compiled code tends to be a LOT bigger than bytecode (by
around a factor of five, for cases I've seen), and this doesn't
necessarily lead to greatly improved performance.
The code that gets helped by "native compilation" is tight loops
involving primitive operations. For Perl, and Icon, for that matter,
code that is /interesting/ will make extensive use of string pattern
matching (regexes, in Perl), and that sort of code will dig into the
"native-compile" libraries, and perform well even with 'byte-compiled'
code.
Perl code that's doing tight loops
foreach $i (0..7500) {
$FOO{$i} += $BAR[$i];
}
/might/ be helped by native compilation, although the fact that the
objects are rather dynamic may mean that this particular code snippet
wouldn't be helped at all.
Perl code that does extensive regex work generally /isn't/ slower than
the equivalent C code, because in both cases, the code that gets run a
lot is the heavily-optimized regular expression libraries.
--
(reverse (concatenate 'string "gro.mca@" "enworbbc"))
http://cbbrowne.com/info/languages.html
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley