This reminds me of slim binaries and runtime optimizations ...
(see http://caesar.ics.uci.edu/oberon/research.html#SlimBinaries )

I noticed something funny there: the PhD student who was working on
dynamic optimizations is now working for Transmeta. What a coincidence
;-)

Alan Schmitt


>[JRJ] There are many other sorts of optimizations that can be done by
>compiling at runtime.  A simple case is that processor-specific instructions
>can be generated instead of generic ones (e.g. Pentium III instructions
>rather than generic 486).  A more interesting example is used by Sun's
>current JIT compiler...  Aggressive inlining and direct dispatch are done
>for all sorts of method calls (that could potentially be overloaded).  If a
>class is later loaded that extends one of the inlined or directly called
>methods, the JIT compiler goes back and "unoptimizes" the code it had
>previously optimized!


--
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen.