[Mono-devel-list] Mono Interpreter: Dietmar's idea.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> - Continual looking up of tokens to get methods/fields/string constants and
> so on. If the instructions are preprocessed in some way so that instructions
> like LDFLD have the offset directly to hand, you have preloaded string
> constants and know where they are so on then a lot of time can be saved per
> call. I think this is the area that would give the biggest speed boost
> (another
> possible preprocess is to fix up endianess & alignment issues in reading
> instructions).

Very good observation.  I forgot about this, but this was also one of
the points Dietmar made about his previous experiment.

Interpreting IR2 (the list of instructions generated by Mini) should
address the various issues you identified before.  This representation
is already a low-level representation and all of the high-level
operations have been decomposed at this level.

For an introduction to the structure of mini, you can read the tutorial
document mono/mono/mini/mini-doc.txt

> Given the current interpretation technique I think all these can be improved
> though no doubt there are other areas - and maybe this is all irrelevant
> if a completely different style of interpreter is used.

Yes, I think the current interpreter can be improved, specially since
there are no plans for us to build a new interpreter using IR2, but it
might be a fun project for someone interested in this.

Miguel