ICOOOLPS Submissions
Both of the papers that people from the PyPy team submitted to ICOOOLPS have been accepted. They are:
(the pdfs are obviously the submitted versions, not the final ones).
This year ICOOOLPS (Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages, Programs and Systems) is being held on July the 6th at ECOOP 2009 in Genova, Italy. Other than these two papers, Anto and Carl Friedrich will also present a PyPy tutorial, on July the 7th.
Comments
It does seem like an odd idea to trace the bytecode of an interpreter of the bytecode of a language, rather than just tracing the bytecode for a language. For example, it requires that you annotate the interpreter to retain information that you would otherwise naturally have, and it requires that you trace lots of extra bookkeeping code in the interpreter.
Given that you're writing a JIT that traces the execution of some bytecode, what advantages does tracing the outer bytecode have over tracing the inner bytecode? Is it that the outer bytecode is simpler than the inner bytecode; if so, is there no way to (inefficiently) compile the inner bytecode to the outer bytecode?
John: The main reason for writing a JIT that traces the bytecode of the "outer" interpreter (which we call language interpreter in the paper) is that then we need to write only one tracing JIT in PyPy, and can use it for a variety of languages.
The tracing of the extra bookkeeping code is not a problem is not such a large problem, as the paper shows. None of these opcodes are actually part of the final trace.
If you want to discuss this more, I would suggest that we move this discussion to pypy-dev@codespeak.net which is the project mailing list. Not everybody is reading comments here :).