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Re: jvm

In article <B5A34D1A.43F1%robm@h2g2.com>, Rob Myers <robm@h2g2.com> 
wrote:

> I think there's some documentation on the old mit-ai site about compiling
> Dylan for Java, but the JVM lacks multimethod support and other good 
> stuff, so Dylan probably wouldn't compile optimally for the JVM.

That's a *big* problem for a Mindy-style (or javac-style) compiler, but 
it's not such a big deal if you're retargetting d2c.  GF dispatch is 
slow even on real CPUs so the compiler tries pretty hard to avoid it 
whenever possible -- and the language design tries to help.  If you use 
something like the GF dispatch algorithm in the recent Cecil/Vortex 
paper then you're doing GF dispatch by using an optomised sequence of 
single-argument dispatches, which *would* map onto what's in the jvm 
fairly well.

-- Bruce
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