Get the latest tech news

Spending too much time optimizing for loops

This is part of a series of blog posts relating my experience pushing the performance of programming language interpreters written in Rust.

A long ways to go still… The BC one is getting there, progress with the AST one is slower for various reasons, including Rust limitations - there’s some interesting stuff to talk about there, maybe in a future blog post. It may sound like a counter-intuitive language design choice, but that’s the beauty of Smalltalk: you can re-implement every method yourself and fundamentally change the behavior of your system, like by making every loop invest in random cryptocurrencies to spice up both your VM and your life (please don’t do this). I don’t think I could have easily predicted this seemingly easy change would be so hard: this requires a lot of knowledge about the system you’re working with and about interpreter design, yet I’m but a humble PhD student.

Get the Android app