Jun 03 2008
∞
"The Structure and Performance of Efficient Interpreters"
A very interesting paper linked by the Webkit blog. Extremely interesting. I think the best quote is:
Some people argue that efficiency is not important in interpreters because they are slow anyway. However, this attitude can lead to an interpreter that is more than a factor of 1000 slower on many programs than native code produced by an optimizing compiler, whereas the slowdown for efficient interpreters is only a factor of 10. I.e., the difference between a slow and a fast interpreter is larger than the difference between a fast interpreter and native code.