PCC reordering idea (and probably branch)

[Allison Randal]

On 03/15/2012 05:20 PM, Andrew Whitworth wrote:
> 
> I'm apprehensive about bacek's proposal, but I might not know enough
> about his plan to really judge it. It's hard to say that CPS is one of
> Parrot's strong points because we still don't implement it in a fully
> leveraged, completely symmetric way. The idea that any Sub invocation
> can be boxed up and dispatched to a different thread is a very
> important part of the threading work that nine has been doing, and I
> wouldn't want to do anything that damages the progress he has made.
> 
> If bacek says we can have speedups without sacrificing important
> functionality, I'm inclined to trust him and see what he comes up
> with.

He has totally proven his worth over the years, and if I said anything
that sounded otherwise, I apologize.

I'm only talking about some technical details of the proposal.
Specifically, about storing arguments in the parent's context. There's
no need for this to be anything other than a straightforward technical
conversation.

> If that's true, I'm not sure I've ever seen what the long-term,
> non-temporary plan was supposed to be. I've got plenty of long-term
> plans of my own, but I developed those plans privately, long after the
> initial PCC refactors. If other people have other ideas for the long
> road to follow, I would be very interested to hear them.

The biggest goal of the last major refactor was to cut down from a dozen
incompatible APIs for making calls, to a single streamlined path. But,
it was largely a surface fix, and the next step was to replace the old
crufty dispatch core behind the clean new API.

Life got in the way, I got sucked in by school and then work, but it's
still a good next step.

Allison