som-v17    23 December 2005

It is going to be new year soon!   I have a great new idea on er... a new VM for som, called T-code (or whatever name).  T-code will be a register based VM as opposed to s-code.  As T-code is 3-address format, it will have less number of instruction executed (dynamic instruction count) than s-code.  The data from various chip designs pointed to 40% noi. of s-code [aisd eecon 2003, sr, compact code jcsse 2005, xs].  This means if all else is equal, T-code vm will be 2.5 times faster than s-code.

So, we are going for speed.  However, I will not make it complex, for example, the number of instruction should not be more than 2x of s-code (so less than 100).  And the compiler optimisation should not be too complex either (to make further change simple).  

Therefore, I will try to have a new year release of Som-v17 with T-code (a major release every year, eh?).  Som-v17 will be a som-v16 (which never made public): macro, static array, new object, no immediate line, hex, file.

My big attempt this release is to make "loadfile" work so that I can load multiple files.  With that I can use Som in most of my work.

Plan of work

1)  make code generator for T-code
2)  build T-code interpreter
3)  when som works with T-code, do "loadfile"

The next release I like to do is to upgrade Som-v2 to Som-v2.3 (v2.2 is already used to make pre-som) to be analogous to v17 (but  is all in Som).

23 December 2005
    