>> I know nothing at all about Java, but there's no technical reason
>> why the C compiler can't compile to p-code [...].

> You are probably aware that a couple of research (and may be even a
> commercial) operating systems do something similar but they go one
> step further and generate machine code on the fly [...].  This
> technique has even greater potential for optimization (because more
> info. is available at runtime) but we are not there yet.

It's also hell to get right on machines that have separate icache and
dcache, especially since user-land usually can't touch the cache and
hence you have to do a syscall before executing the newly-generated
code.

And trying to debug it is fun too, because cacheing bugs are usually
heisenbugs.

					der Mouse

			    mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu