Re: [tclquadcode] 'expand' branch merged

[Donal K. F. <don...@ma...>]

On 11/11/2017 22:54, Kevin Kenny wrote:
> I've done a 'merge --integrate' of the 'expand' branch into trunk.
> Quadcode now understands most uses of {*} and can even do a competent
> job of optimization with some of them.
> 
> I might not be doing all that much more quadcode development for a few
> days. In the meantime, let's try to triage what should come next. Are
> we trying next to go to full integration with Tcl's arrays? (I haven't
> thought much about that, but that's the way Donal seems to be
> heading.)

Actually, I've been working on padding out support for as much of Tcl's 
bytecode as possible, going broad rather than deep. :-) I've got a list 
of operations that remain to be done, and I'm aiming to get at least 
something sensible done for the majority of user code, even if the 
semantics are not entirely correct. I've got five bytecode ops left to 
do and they all touch callframes; e.g., evalStk and exprStk can pretty 
much do anything (especially for non-constant inputs) so they're going 
to remain expensive, but at least we can have a chance to generate 
correct code for them now that we have callframes. The support for [dict 
with] is rather more awkward. :-(

I don't think we should plan to do NRE or TclOO (a total of another 10 
bytecode ops) in the near future. They both require major surgery to 
things both for analysis and for code generation, and will take quite a 
while to implement.

In any case, the support for expansion is important and I'm intending to 
think more about local arrays (the hack I did simply won't work with 
[upvar] about, especially with uncompiled code) so there's that. It'll 
probably result in more quadcode operations (or allowing changing the 
possible number of arguments to them; I don't know which is better) but 
may work. I'll need to have a deeper look. One of the problems is that 
we've got typically two input operations (i.e., by LVT index and by 
name) and yet three basic implementation strategies: direct, via LVT and 
Tcl's irritatingly expensive boxed types, and via full name lookup 
(which is pretty much just using Tcl's standard C API).

Also, apologies for not saying much about this recently; I've mostly 
been working in my mornings, at times when anyone sensible in the US 
would be asleep, and I've kept getting interrupted before I wrote things 
up. It happens. :-)

Donal.