On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Aaron Sherman wrote: >You don't want to have to convert to-and-from arrays of PMCs in order to do those ops, and regardless of what kind of hyper-nifty-mumbo-jumbo you put into Parrot, that's exactly what you're going to have to do.
Why? I was under the impression that in Perl 6 it was going to be possible to declare arrays that only contain values of a particular type -- I believe the syntax I saw was:
my @array is float;
I don't know what the current syntax is, but it doesn't matter--you'll be able to do this.
Aggregates don't have to hold PMCs, they can hold base types. Binary vtable functions that know the internal representation of both sides (probably because you've used MMD to get there, but hey, peek if you want) can dive right into the underlying bits and go wild without ever touching a PMC if they want.
Most of PDL should be doable efficiently in bytecode without having to drop to C. (Fortran, possibly, but only because I'd bet that a Fortran version of most of the matrix ops would be a bit faster, given most Fortran compilers have amazingly good optimizers, which our JIT will likely never be able to touch)
--
Dan
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