Re: [DotGNU]gcc?

[Rhys Weatherley]

Keith Poole wrote:

> Fair enough, but one thought that occurs to me is - if we have a VM
> which handles IL in any form, this will be true, anyone could produce a
> proprietary language which generated IL, and the .GNU VM would happily
> run it.

This is a continuation of my previous message.  I realised
that I didn't fully explain why a non-RTL VM wouldn't have
the same problem.

A VM based around a traditional JIT (compile on the fly
to native code in memory) can only be used to run the
compiler fast, or to run the resulting program fast.  It
cannot be used to compile the program directly down
to efficient native code and thus give proprietary
language implementors a super assembler for free.

This is something that we will have to watch if we ever
build an "installation JIT", like Microsoft has.

Cheers,

Rhys.