World: r3wp

Yeah, with braw I wasn't concerned with the 2 opcodes you would have 
to add before any call to braw to make it usable; I was more concerned 
with actually being able to get the address offsets to compute with 
without having to write a compiler (which I am going to do anyways, 
just not right now). That was why I came up with that HERE assembler 
directive.

Still, an absolute braw would take less than half the time that using 
a relative braw takes when you have to compute those offsets.

Have you tried to communicate that with Carl?

BrianH - you seem to be skilled in that area. What speedup do you 
think compiling rebcode could achieve? And - how large the compiler 
would be?

Gabriele says he relayed my concerns, but the rewrite of fix-bl hasn't 
been incorporated. Sounds like Carl hasn't agreed.

then there must be some reason :-) let's wait for an explanation. 
IMO Carl is opened to suggestions ...

rebcode12 added GLT (a < b < c) and GLTE (a <= b <= c). It's nice 
to have intervals, but in practice I use intervals that are open 
from one side and closed from second side or vice versa, i. e. (a 
<=b < c)

As for how large the compiler would be, it depends on the source 
language and how ambitious you are. If the language is REBOL-based, 
then at least I don't have to write a lexer. It would depend on what 
kind of optimizations you want to incorporate and how static you 
are willing to make the language dialect that you want to compile. 
Type inferencing would add a lot too, but would have a major benefit 
when translating from a dynamic language like REBOL to a static one 
like rebcode.

Parse would help a lot, obviously.

Carl is open to suggestions when he has time to hear them. He is 
very busy, and niether he nor Gabriele have suggested I contact him 
directly about this.

ah, you talk about separate compiler? I thought you will just JIT 
rebcode?

That's Carl's job. A job which could make rebcode twice as fast to 
be sure :)

where in rebol such stuff as JIT belongs? Would it be just a function 
you would point to a rebcode code?

In theory, it would be an implementation feature of the rebcode VM. 
Now that you mention it though, there are a few JITs that can be 
called as a library, such as libjit, LLVM and libtcc. If you took 
the finished rebcode code block you could translate it to one of 
their intermediate languages and have them translate it to native 
code. Sort of like a to-native function.

The apply and do opcodes wouldn't survive the trip though.

hmm, but then you just will have few helper funcs in rebcode to speed 
your code execution here or there. OK, so you produce JIT using some 
external library, but how you link it back to rebol? (maybe wrong 
question not understanding properly how this stuff would work :-)

Rebol would have to provide better hooks. To access rebol-values 
directly.

yes, that might be the interface I asked about last time Carl was 
here. He told me he planned to provide API to rebol internals, but 
he told something like it could become complex (even security was 
mentioned iirc) and that rebcode replace it, so ....

Starting with a c-compiler as "jit" would make that easy (sharing 
includes etc). And an extra speedup *30 is nice.

Look at the Tuesday discussion here with Carl, few interesting notes 
(it was related to how plug-ins were planned) ...

ok, but how would you translate rebcode to C? Hmm, maybe it would 
not be so difficult, it is somehow between the assembler and C anyway 
:-)

btw - is there any cross-platform, small C compiler eventually? so 
that we could create kind of "module/component/plug-in" later and 
have it included? :-)

Right. WOuld be nearly another kind of markup for most things. This 
computed gotos may not work, but the rest should.

tcc, even available as library. But x86 only afaik.

so you could e.g. convert rebcode to dll and redirect the call, to 
get native C level speed? Hmm, sounds like there are some options 
for the future :-)

Yes, that would be possible. Similar to doing it with a jit, only 
slower compilation and bigger compiler.

Butmost easy to start with IMHO. Once it works, Carl cant resist 
to beat it with something own anyway :) But not really possible without 
access to rebol-values.

Volker, you wouldn't need to provide hooks if you pass those values 
as parameters.

I wonder if there would be someone so insane to try convert rebol 
interpreter iself into rebcode :-)

But we are talking rebcode, and rebcode can do more. for example 
you can write a forall in rebcode, but not with routines.

... hmm, that would be slower after all, forget that ....

I guess Carl will be that insane, one day, in hollydays. :))

Pekr, that's the compiler I was thinking to build :)

I guess Pekr did not mean to compile rebol, but to have a real interpreter, 
as the one which is now in c.

or?

Volker, I know, but some time ago I though that e.g. you have rebol 
block for e.g. and I thought that there might be some api, kind of 
DOM, so that from C library, you would access it via such structure 
and you would manipulate rebol datatype value directly

I e.g. did small dll some time ago to do some histogram etc. stuff 
with image. Image is easy - four bytes of values per pixel - worked 
well, but I modified binary value directly. Now imagine how would 
you work with rebol block in C level eventually :-)

Yes, that is what i would want too. then you can jit rebcode with 
a c-compiler.

Volker, I've heard that some people are trying to make tcc portable 
(to ARM so far) but they aren't that far yet.

That's why I suggested LLVM.

AFAIK AmigaDE has good compilers for various cpus, around 40k. But 
that means money.

Or for that matter, Mono is available as a library, and you can access 
the .NET runtime that way too.

Or java. Problem with that is, they are not optimized for unions, 
and rebol depends on them.

Oh well, now that there is an official (alpha) release of rebcode, 
I submitted my HERE directive to RAMBO.

But Carl said once, a good jit like ADE would take him a month. Now 
if we can put him that long on vacation.. :))

BrainH: use RT Q & A group here, that might be faster :-)

hmm, but most of that stuff is several times the size of rebol itself 
:-)

Jump on Gabriele when he shows up..

Isn't there really a stuff like 40KB, free, crossplatform, so that 
we could have it "onboard"? :-)

I tried that. It only worked with things they were already working 
on. Gabriele and my sleep schedules have very little overlap :(