Programming runrev-externals with realbasic

Alex Rice alex at mindlube.com
Mon Sep 8 18:29:04 EDT 2003


On Monday, September 8, 2003, at 04:50  PM, Alex Rice wrote:

> Runrev is also a compiled language, but it compiles at run-time, 
> similarly to Java with it's "JIT" and "hotspot" compilation.

OK I was just double-checking my facts because I couldn't remember 
where I picked that up. The runrev docs and website don't have any 
technical information about the compiler and engine!

Here is something I found on metacard.com :

"There were two major areas of development for the [metacard engine] 
2.0 release. The first was a complete rewrite of the language execution 
system to improve performance and add features not available in other 
xTalk languages. The resulting "virtual compiler" technology offers 
performance comparable to byte-code interpreted languages like Perl and 
Java, and which is at least 5 times faster than the partial compilation 
compilers used in comparable tools including HyperCard and SuperCard.  
It is up to 30 times faster than languages that rely on conventional 
interpreters like JavaScript and the UNIX shell languages."

In Java, the standard runtime was byte-code interpreted. That being 
awfully slow especially for GUI apps, lots of companies developed 
"just-in-time"/ JIT compilation, Sun coming up with the name "hotspot" 
for it.

So where does the Rev engine fall in these categories? Just curious.

Alex Rice <alex at mindlube.com> | Mindlube Software | http://mindlube.com

what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable  -Ani DiFranco




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