paka VS Papers

I think bins/boot.bc in the paka repo is a minivm binary file that does bootstrapping for paka.

Personally, I find it pretty impressive that it performs as well as these runtimes despite not having a JIT compiler. I'm pretty sure Shaw's written more benchmarks, but as the README explains, it's really hard to tell what the performance characteristics of a language are without writing a larger application. So far the largest applications written with MiniVM is Paka[0], a self-hosted language similar to Lua that targets MiniVM; os49[1], an operating system built on Paka/MiniVM in the spirit of lisp machines; and xori[2], an online playground for the language.

[0]: https://github.com/FastVM/paka

Some similar languages from this community: my Paka (even down to the println), and someone else's Cthulhu.

Further to this: this kind of thing is something the Forth community takes seriously. They call these threaded code techniques. [0] (The Gforth interpreter, for instance, gives you the choice of various different techniques.)

Anton Ertl of Gforth fame published a microbenchmark performance comparison of toy interpreters, written in C, run on various CPUs. [1] As you say, the approach using function pointers (call threading) scores poorly.

Interestingly, direct threading and indirect threading are extremely close, with the winner seeming to depend on the specific CPU. [1] Branch-prediction differences seem to be the main reason. There was a 2001 paper on this. [2]

[0] https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/threaded-code.html

[1] https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/threading/

[2] https://github.com/ForthPapersMirror/Papers/blob/master/Conv...