Ops Review

[Geoffrey Broadwell]

On Mon, 2009-01-19 at 17:13 -0500, Bob Rogers wrote:
>    > What are you suggesting as replacements? Or (with the probable
>    > exception of fact) must every language reinvent these wheels?
> 
>    I had in mind the idea that they could become members of a PBC library.
> 
>    -- c
> 
> Do you think that would be fast enough?  The usual way for dynamic
> languages to get fast compiled numeric code is to bind variables to
> hardware types at compile time, and then inline numeric operations in
> order to use that information.  That seems to require op_i_i_i and
> op_n_n_n versions of these ops, which are not language-dependent.
> 
>    And possibly of other ops as well.  Speed should certainly not be an
> issue for Parrot 1.0, so I can see not wanting to add new numeric ops,
> but I don't see the point of removing ops we already have only to decide
> we need them later.

I second this ... and in regards to chromatic's earlier question, I end
up using (the sugared version of) Parrot's bitwise ops regularly.  I've
in the past seen ISAs that tried to avoid including bitwise ops as a
core primitive, but they always end up seeing the light in later
revisions.  (For a recent example, look no further than your video
card.)


-'f