Re: Diversity - existence, value, and pursuit.

[Johan Ovlinger <address@hidden>]

laziness probits me from attributing:
  > Some of Java's sementics were originaly though to be optimizable, but it
  > turned out they weren't. They are : stack allocatable objects, array
  > bound checks and dynamic method call lookup.
		     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  This is turning into a major bummer for dynamic language optimization.
  I'm surprised (he says, looking around) there's no successful work on this.

If I understand the ideas behind dynamo and self, this is exactly the
sort of thing they try to optimise. Doesn't it fall under the heading
of "things knowable only at runtime?" A method can easily be
specialised on the exact types of its references (arguments and
instance variables), defaulting to the slow-but-general case if there
isn't a specialised version yet. If a particular slow version is used
n times in x seconds and makes y dynamic invokcations, a fast version
is specialised.

I haven't given the other issues any thought, but optimisim springs
eternal.

Johan