From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Mar 30 05:29:43 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id FAA26730 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 30 Mar 1995 05:29:43 -0800 Received: from deacon.cogsci.ed.ac.uk (deacon.cogsci.ed.ac.uk [129.215.144.7]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id FAA26677; Thu, 30 Mar 1995 05:25:11 -0800 Received: (from richard@localhost) by deacon.cogsci.ed.ac.uk (8.6.10/8.6.9) id OAA05112; Thu, 30 Mar 1995 14:21:17 +0100 Date: Thu, 30 Mar 1995 14:21:17 +0100 Message-Id: <199503301321.OAA05112@deacon.cogsci.ed.ac.uk> From: Richard Tobin Subject: Re: HotJava To: Bakul Shah , Dave Cornejo In-Reply-To: Bakul Shah's message of Wed, 29 Mar 95 19:19:50 -0800 Organization: just say no Cc: jkh@freefall.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard), freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > 2) The job is non-trivial. He was rather vague, but mumbled something > > about possibly needing kernel support. > > I suspect this may have to do with on-the-fly code > generation from the byte-code. The usual problems with on-the-fly code generation are (a) If you jump to the new code just after writing it, your pipeline may get filled before the code is written. This can be solved by executing a few NOPs after generating the code. (b) If you have separate I/D cache, you may have to flush (part of) the I cache in order to see the modified code. This doesn't arise on 386/486, does it? What about 586? > I must say I am not sold on Java yet. Scheme remains my > favorite prototyping language. I'm hoping that the GNU scripting language (which will be a Scheme) will come along and displace perl and tk/tcl, but I'm not holding my breath. At least Java exists, though Sun's experience with NeWS (which also encouraged downloading small programs [in postscript]) isn't especially encouraging. -- Richard