Interesting hardware and computer intellect

[Chuck Guzis]

On 16 Jul 2007 at 23:06, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:

> You *can* write a good compiler for bytecode.  It just takes a bit more 
> effort.

When the target machine needs a lot of subroutine calls to handle the 
elements of a language, then the difference between bytecode and 
native code gets very small.  For example, there's not a lot of 
performance difference between compiled to native code BASIC and 
bytecode-compiled BASIC.  Easily swamped out by a clever runtime 
optimization or two.  I've seen it done, much to my glee.

On the other hand, FORTRAN optimized and compiled to native code on 
an AMD64 platform would probably smoke bytecode-compiled FORTRAN on 
the same platform something awful.

Prolog or SIMSCRIPT might be a different situation.

Cheers,
Chuck