[Apologies to Marco if he's getting this twice; this message didn't seem to go out the first time I sent it.]
On Sun, Apr 14, 2002 at 08:21:51PM +0200, Marco Baringer wrote: > > i have written 4 different forms of looping ops with varying degrees > of usefullness. i think that if these were to are accepted the form > which gets used the most in real code should be renamed 'loop' (of > course, since most code is/will be machine generated this may be > completly irrelavent). Could you describe better the need and usefulness of these ops? My immediate reaction is "Why not just code loops ourselves?" I think your ops can be implemented in two currently-existing opcodes apiece, and I'm guessing that JIT support for the more primitive ops is going to appear before support for the loop ops. On the other hand, I may be overlooking a good reason for adding these. The two reasons I can think of right now are (1) you've done benchmarking and combining these ops demonstrates a significant speedup or (2) some hardware architectures have native instructions for the loop ops that are measurably more efficient than the direct translation of the primitive op pair. (Though I doubt that; the primitives are at least as easy for the hardware to parallelize and neither possibility touches any more or less data memory.)
