Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages?

"Michael Tiomkin" <tmk@netvision.net.il> wrote in message
> On Dec 4, 8:09 pm, "Tony" <t...@my.net> wrote:
>> To me, it seems like "reducing everything to a function" may be a bit
>> dated given that OO languages are the thing nowadays. Can anyone
>> imagine any new potential assembly language instructions that would
>> make implementation of OO languages easier? (Not just necessarily the
>> function thing, but anything).
>
> Well, when I learned OO, a method was thought as a message sent to
> an object, not a function!-)


That (Smalltalk way) has always seemed "wrong" to me. It seems to have
combined OO and "event driven" styles. Indeed, Smalltalk was (is still?)
bound to a GUI! What WERE those Smalltalk guys thinking?! (Thinking like
marketeers instead of engineers probably).


>
> I do not see any connection between easy compilation of OO languages
> and machine instructions - creating the actual code is one of the
> easiest parts of a compiler. If you mean making the OO programs run
> faster, a different memory model can help very much.


I was just pondering whether some of the OO mechanisms could move out of the
language and into instructions, machine code or even processor architecture
(the sky is the limit for this brainstorming). You said: "easy compilation".
I am "at war" with vptrs (not to limit the discussion to just that though).
To me, something seems "not right" with taking OO class objects and shoving
a vptr into them. On the flip side, it "feels right" to me to push/pop args
on/off the stack to implement functions.


>
> In C++ we deal with a lot of very short chunks of memory, many of
> them independent.


Please explain before I try to grok the "solution" you proposed for the
"problem" above.


> I understand that some ancient computers (in the 2nd millennium)
> used segmented memory.


I looked into this 10 years ago and convinced myself that the segmented
architecture is still there but that the segments are just now very large
(move from 16 to 32 bit?). (Is that the case?).


Tony
[Every x86 chip has a fully functioning address segmentation system, which
nobody uses. There's probably a lesson there. -John]

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