Re:A CPU Is a Compiler
by Joker_vD on Thursday March 23, 2023 @08:24AM
(#35273605)
Surprisingly, there is not that much distance between tree-walking evaluator and (stack-oriented-)bytecode emitter: you just have slightly different accumulator (integer vs. list of bytecodes) with slightly different operations on it (arithmetics vs. appending line "add/sub/etc." to the end of list).
Throw in some more of context tracking (e.g. "did the left-hand side turn out to be a constant" or "are we in the (X+Y)+Z situation?" etc.) and you can start doing optimization such as constant folding and expression-tree rebalancing.
Then you can start emitting chunks of assembly instead of bytecode ("iconst X" turns into "push X", "add" turns into "pop eax; pop ecx; add eax, ecx; push eax" etc). Again, with enough context tracking (for example, what's in what registers), you can emit much less stupid assembly.
Throw in some more of context tracking (e.g. "did the left-hand side turn out to be a constant" or "are we in the (X+Y)+Z situation?" etc.) and you can start doing optimization such as constant folding and expression-tree rebalancing.
Then you can start emitting chunks of assembly instead of bytecode ("iconst X" turns into "push X", "add" turns into "pop eax; pop ecx; add eax, ecx; push eax" etc). Again, with enough context tracking (for example, what's in what registers), you can emit much less stupid assembly.