On 16 Jul 2007 at 23:06, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
You *can* write a good compiler for bytecode. It just
takes a bit more
effort.
When the target machine needs a lot of subroutine calls to handle the
elements of a language, then the difference between bytecode and
native code gets very small. For example, there's not a lot of
performance difference between compiled to native code BASIC and
bytecode-compiled BASIC. Easily swamped out by a clever runtime
optimization or two. I've seen it done, much to my glee.
On the other hand, FORTRAN optimized and compiled to native code on
an AMD64 platform would probably smoke bytecode-compiled FORTRAN on
the same platform something awful.
Prolog or SIMSCRIPT might be a different situation.
Cheers,
Chuck