Building a Minimalistic Virtual Machine

Re:Building a Minimalistic Virtual Machine by kaba0 on Saturday February 25, 2023 @04:53PM (#34940843)

I eagerly await your results, and didn’t want to sound condescending at all, sorry if it came across like that. I was just genuinely interested in a - to me - more understandable difference.

Also, what does “native performance” even mean here? Only removing the interpreter overhead?

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Re:Building a Minimalistic Virtual Machine by maxime_cb on Saturday February 25, 2023 @05:09PM (#34940946)

Thanks for clarifying. Tone is sometimes ambiguous via text.

At the moment I'm in no rush to actually write the JIT compiler because I think it's faster to iterate with an interpreter. I want to flesh out the VM and its APIs, test the hell out of everything and develop the system a bit more first.

The interpreter runs at something ~400 million instructions per second on my laptop, which is probably close to the performance of an old school Pentium 2 chip, so it's actually fast enough to run a lot of non-trivial software. With even a really basic JIT I should be able to hit 10x that throughput. I've benchmarked code out of GCC and it runs about 27 times faster (on a microbenchmark).

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