Re: Why are intepreters so slow today
randy hyde (rhyde@hornsby.NoSubdomain.NoDomain)
15 Apr 1994 23:59:54 GMT
I would like the see the compiler and interpreter which was
written a while back which had a 10x performance difference.
However, I can probably guess why this was the case.
Many years ago interpreters were commonly written in assembly
language because that was the only way to get acceptable
performance. At that time, compilers were lousy at producing
optimized code. Today, compilers are highly optimizing and
interpreters are mostly written in C (or some other HLL).
This might explain why interpreters are slower today (relative
to compiled code).