[Mono-list] Gcc front-end?

[Fergus Henderson]

On 10-Jul-2001, Tyson Dowd <trd@cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> If you are going to have a JIT, gcc is not going to be fast enough -- it
> wasn't designed for it.

I agree.  But most of the time JIT is not what you want anyway.
Compilation at install time is more often what you want.

Of course it would be nice if there was a JIT as well,
for the times when you really want it.  But a lot of
applications could live without it.

> I believe native code is cached during a single session (but not between
> reboots) -- others think it isn't the case, but it seems to be that way
> to me.

I'm one of the others.  What makes you think that?

I'm pretty sure you are wrong.  In the MS implementation, native
code is cached during a single process, but it is not shared between
multiple invocations of the same executable (even if they are running
concurrently), unless you use the install-time compiler (ngen.exe).
If you use that, then the results persist across reboots.

I haven't seen the MS implementation, but I've heard that from several MS
people.

> I'm not sure if there is any documentation on what actually happens.

There is some documentation on ngen.exe: see
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cptools/html/cpgrfnativeimagegeneratorngenexe.asp>

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.