Article first draft: CTFE,DDL,DLL all dead ?

[John Reimer]

Burton Radons wrote:

>> I think that in your article you should include a brief comparison with the JIT 
>> techniques of Java/.NET. To a naive reading, it sounds similar; but they are 
>> fundamentally different. .NET's last-minute conversion of intermediate form to 
>> native code doesn't buy you very much. JIT source code generation is something 
>> else entirely. Using your library, you can have JIT selection of the 
>> _algorithm_. FFTW (www.fftw.org) is an interesting example of this sort of thing.
> 
> I don't know much about Sun's Java or Microsoft's .NET JITs; I'll read about them when I have the time.
> 
> From my initial perusal, dynamic recompilation is certainly something you could do, where you profile code then generate a more optimal version of the function based upon how it's being used or the environment. However, I'd like a more solid case for where that could be useful in D before putting it in the article.


Just out of curiousity, isn't such a dynamic recompilation technique 
used is some emulator systems (CPU instruction translators like the old 
680x0 emulators for PowerPC systems).  I believe some of these ideas 
were used to compile, profile, and cache runs of instructions (saving 
the optimal results)... or something to that effect.

-JJR