Reply To: Simulation

Greetings all,

Those of you interested in an interpreter/interpreted language for the Mill may enjoy reading the following paper, available (as of today) free online:
“The Structure and Performance of Efficient Interpreters” by M. Anton Ertl and David Gregg. Here’s the link: http://www.jilp.org/vol5/v5paper12.pdf

One thing this paper focuses on is that on many CPUs, branch prediction for indirect branches (e.g. via function pointers) is often much poorer than branch prediction for direct branches (like simple if/then/else constructs.) I suppose I should re-watch the presentation on the Mill’s prediction mechanism, to see what’s revealed about how the Mill will handle indirect branches. This issue is much less important for compiled code than for interpreted code, but apparently still gets involved in run-time method dispatch,e.g. in polymorphic objects.

I note that Yale Patt’s work is cited several times in this paper and I recall reading other interesting papers by Ertl.

Enjoy!