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Re: parrot rx engine

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From:
Melvin Smith
Date:
January 30, 2002 08:55
Subject:
Re: parrot rx engine
Message ID:
5.1.0.14.0.20020130114819.02a8f870@pop.mindspring.com

>Basically, I see a black-box being built in the interests of speed.
>Voodoo array formats, bitmaps, and other such things to avoid actually
>spelling out what the regular expression is doing *in parrot code*.
[snip]
>What I see is that rx_literal is a speed hack to avoid compiling this
>into parrot code:
[snip]
>I think that's exactly what you should be doing! Neither parrot nor the
>rx engine should try to be a full compiler. The rx engine definitely
>should have opcodes in the virtual machine, but those opcodes should
[snip]
>Once you squash rx_literal and friends, any attempt to benchmark the
>"rx" engine really becomes a benchmark of parrot itself. When you speed
>up parrot, you speed up regular expressions. Voila, no more black box.
>If Parrot is just too damn slow for you, whip out libmylang and do the

This is a serious reply, I'm not taking potshots, but correct me if I'm
wrong: by your argument, we should implement lots of other black boxes
in "parrot" rather than C such as anything that is not a basic low level
call (for example upper layer IO system, buffering, etc.).

Otherwise I'm unsure where you think a black box is appropriate and
where it isn't.

-Melvin


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